Certain and Impossible Events

by Candace Jane Opper

CERTAIN AND IMPOSSIBLE EVENTS orbits the death of a fourteen-year-old boy who shot and killed himself a week after Kurt Cobain’s suicide had become international news. Haunted by the hazy circumstances around her classmate’s death, Candace Jane Opper takes a kaleidoscopic lens to the cultural history of suicide in America, unearthing an invisible network and revealing the ways that no individual suicide—well-known or hardly documented—exists in a vacuum. Fusing personal narrative with history and science, Opper interrogates the ways suicide is handed down to us—from literature to YouTube, from middle school health class to sociological study, from the immutability of objects to the fluidity of oral history. In this candid and unsentimental epistolary essay, Opper invites us into her decades-long obsession with a boy she barely knew, creating space for herself and her readers to embrace a radical kind of unforgetting.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Mental Health

174 pages, Paperback

Published January 15, 2021

About the author

Candace Jane Opper is the author of Certain and Impossible Events (2021), selected by Cheryl Strayed for the Kore Press Memoir Award. Her essays have appeared in Guernica, Longreads, Narratively, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Literary Hub, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Vestoj, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, writer Patrick McGinty, and their son.

Reviews

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since the May 2020 article in Narratively adapted from the not-yet-released book, it has felt like a long wait to the January 2021 publication, but the book was everything I hoped it would be.

Opper was 13 when her 14-year-old classmate — a boy she had a crush on but otherwise didn't really know — shot himself. The event permanently seized her imagination in ways she always struggled to explain. In college, her academic focus centered on this personal loss and how it was interpreted in art.

“I wrote a paper about the ways literary biographies that end in suicide end up constructing a life that is inevitably leading to that point, and, in many cases, framing the suicide as the subject’s final work of art…I began with hardbound library books about suicidal behavior, books with titles like The Cry For Help and Traitor Within, whose spines hadn’t been cracked in decades.” (p. 43)

In her thirties, she devoted herself more fully to unpacking the specific mystery that manifested for her personally. "The impulse to write about you”—with the pronoun “you,” she is addressing the boy who died by suicide—

“came from a desire to provide an end to a story that had been left unfinished and, to a slightly lesser degree, to designate myself the unofficial narrator of a story I assumed no one else would tell. I distinctly remember thinking that, if I just told your story right, then I could move on…The writing, of course, has always been an act of never having to move on, of constantly engaging with a story that has no obligation to end…After that first failed attempt came the fictionalized versions, the afterlife fantasies, the dark poetry, and later, the college papers, the philosophical inquiry, the reflection. I grew up and the story grew with me, adapting to the contours of my existence in a kind of devastating symbiosis.” (p. 37)

This is a memoir of a generally innocent and sheltered childhood in a quiet New England suburb in the '80s and '90s, a setting she recalls and describes with special talent, and the book may interest readers who are nostalgic for that, but I think it will especially speak to people who have gazed into the springs and gears of their own personal and academic fascinations trying to understand the origins and the ends.

If you want to buy a copy, by the way, hitting the "A-----" button on this website won't do it. It's sold by Kore Press.

[Adam Messinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

I lost my brother unexpectedly when I was 16–not to suicide but in a way that Brett’s story reminded me of my own loss. I think Opper does a really incredible and admirable job of telling this story and interrogating her own obsession and reasoning. Her complicated feelings were a welcome addition to this story and left me trusting her as we went on this journey.

At times I was wondering how I would react if someone wrote a piece about my brother and the effect his death had on their life. Stepping outside of my writer’s brain and the idea that “I called dibs” on the subject, I would be really flattered by the proposition—no, not flattered. The idea that someone is still thinking about my brother (and Brett) and that their deaths had ripples in ways that I never knew would bring a strange peacefulness to my grief. And if they wrote about it with the care and beauty that Opper does, even better.

What inhibited me from really connecting to this story is that the memoir genre, especially ones that interrogate/focus on grief, is a highly saturated market. So much so that there is a certain bag of tricks one must employ when writing in that style. The use of second person to address the dead, flashbacks and braided structures, and interrogating what you would say to your younger self. It all can start to feel very MFA program. And some people really enjoy that! Opper’s sentences and paragraphs reveal truths about the human condition and require second readings to fully grasp the depth behind them. But I guess I just require a certain—I’m gonna say it—rawness to writing about grief and lost ones that cannot come from a fellowship program. The analytical brain from someone on the outside of grief, chasing at it, picking at it, will never have the same effect as someone directly experiencing it and writing from the heart. And maybe that’s the appeal of this book! We certainly don’t need another overwrought book about how sad your personal familial loss was.

Would love more work from this author in the future. Her work on You’re Wrong About is some of my favorite of that already incredible podcast! Check out her episode on Courtney Love. Some of the best.

[Tia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully crafted book that tells a story of how a suicide has made the author feel like finding out ‘why’ will help her close a door in her mind. It dives in the studies behind suicides and the myth that we “heal” from deaths in our lives. Instead, it becomes part of the fabric of who we are and how we try to explain it to our souls. I had to take a long time to complete it because it’s a book you digest is small doses and while in quiet thought and space.

[Colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Candace Jane Opper is definitely obsessed, and writing this book seems unlikely to have relieved her of that obsession given its depth. When she was young, a boy that she had a serious crush on killed himself. Since then, she has not let it go and the book combines her obsession with that boy and his suicide with the study of suicide in general. This is mostly a memoir though, and I generally find stories of obsession fascinating. I got the impression that she knew just how much she was exposing of herself, but at the same time, perhaps she was so obsessed as to think it wasn't all that weird? Overall, it's a thought provoking book that I'd recommend.

[Alejandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's well written but grew tired of the same narrative. I get it's supposed to be about youth and suicide but it was all about herself and her connection to some boy she didn't even know. She inserts herself in so many spaces and scenarios that made me cringe.
I enjoyed the stuff in between but it was few and far between.

[Ivy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and brutally honest look at death, grief, and obsession. I am not sure a lesser writer could have pulled it off. Some of my favorite lines (gets a little heavy, obviously):

"His death seemed to bestow her with a unique kind of wisdom, something like faith, but deeper, because it was earned rather than believed."

"I have, on some level, conditioned myself not to regret this moment, and perhaps I don't. Or perhaps I just fill my mouth with the proclamation of having no regrets, of regret being a useless emotion, when in fact the landscape of my regret is so vast and familiar under my feet I no longer recognize it."

"There is nothing inherently romantic about suicide because romance is not a quality; it is a filter through which we perceive -- by choice or necessity or both."

"... she has neglected to respond to any of my current inquiries, which is just as well; I'd rather my greediness for her side of the story go unsatisfied."

"Maybe the act of happening makes it necessary, given the changes it sets into motion by way of its having happened. If I call your death unnecessary, aren't I also saying the same of everything that came afterwards? Aren't I also saying that this version of my life is unnecessary?"

"Fixation is curiosity, defiance, momentum. Closure is just a false horizon."

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those genre-transcending narratives that I enjoy oh so much, jealous that little of my research has personal dimensions. This is memoir, research, and cultural critique—and outstanding in each.

I have so little experience with grief, yet the examined wound in Opper’s book is revealed in layers over years with such care that I understand her grief and can re-examine some of my own teenage trauma in new ways. The section that takes up haunting/ghosts was particularly poignant for me. Real and imagined specters help us understand our past and our feelings about it. This reminded me of Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Encounters, but it’s been so long since I’ve read it that I don’t trust my memory for an accurate gloss. Ironic and too on the nose.

Opper’s writing is everything you want in memoir and research. It’s precise in its introspection (the final sentence in plenty of paragraphs will make you want to reread them just to enjoy the mental journey to the thought’s conclusion again). The research excursions are made personal and treated with the same reflection process. My only regret is reading this over a few weeks and splitting into a couple sittings. It deserved to be relished in a day or two!

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary book that was like nothing I’ve ever read. The author explores suicide, grief, childhood, and loss with a disarming intimacy. As someone who grew up around the same time as the author, in the 90s, there was a comfortable familiarity to the descriptions of her youth in that time. Anyway, this is a book you should read for yourself. It’s pretty special. Also, shout out to my favorite podcast “You’re Wrong About” for putting this book and author on my radar.

[Kyrie Bushaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning tribute to all those who live with suicide—however near or far the connection—and those whose stories are buried deep with their suicide. This book is a great unearthing. As horrifying and dark as it is light and hilarious. Someone Owens covers the full spectrum, bravely and deftly. I have never seen anything like it.

[Kelsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The topic is vulnerable and unusual which sucks you in from the very beginning. Opper’s prose and ability to weave research with personal experience keeps you reading. Reading this book reminds you that we’re all human, we’re all interconnected in a myriad of webs that can’t always be explained, and we should stay curious about it all.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this! Candace shows so much vulnerability by continually re-examining her relationship to Brett, his story and his family, not to mention the wider population of people who have lost loved ones to suicide. With deliberate and evocative prose she wonders whether she has a right to tell this story, which over decades has become her story, too. I'm so glad she did.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What we have lost defines us."

There is no future when you are thirteen; there is only the present moment during which fate either spares or condemns you.

Cutoffs meant spring and spring meant summer and summer was easy.

Perhaps the only real contagion was the fear of contagion.

If none of us had ever seen or heard of suicide, would we think to do it?

Mayo shouldn't be a given.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book from the library several months ago and didn't have time to get to it right away. In that time a person close to me committed suicide and I eventually picked this up, which gave reading this book a whole new meaning. Much of it rang true for so many reasons.

[Leah Tallon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without a doubt the best book I’ve read in years. I’ll be chewing on this for the rest of my life.

[Indre Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up