Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide

by Juliet Patterson

A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family. In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father’s father had taken his own life; so had her mother’s. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold? In three graceful movements, Patterson explores these questions. In the winter of her father’s death, she struggles to make sense of the loss—sifting through the few belongings he left behind, looking to signs and symbols for meaning. As the spring thaw comes, she and her mother depart Minnesota for her father’s burial in her parents’ hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas. A once-prosperous town of promise and of violence, against people and the land, Pittsburg is now literally undermined by abandoned claims and sinkholes. There, Patterson carefully gathers evidence and radically imagines the final days of the grandfathers—one a fiery pro-labor politician, the other a melancholy businessman—she never knew. And finally, she returns to her to the haunting subjects of goodbyes, of loss, and of how to break the cycle. A stunning elegy that vividly enacts Emily Dickinson’s dictum to “tell it slant,” Sinkhole richly layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Mental Health, Biography Memoir

260 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 13, 2022

About the author

Juliet Patterson is the author of Sinkhole: A Natural History of a Suicide (Milkweed Editions, September 2022) and two full-length poetry collections, Threnody, (Nightboat Books 2016), a finalist for the 2017 Audre Lorde Poetry Award, and The Truant Lover, (Nightboat Books, 2006), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2006 Lambda Literary Award. A recipient of a Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in non-fiction, and a Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, she has also been awarded fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Minneapolis-based Creative Community Leadership Institute (formerly the Institute for Community and Creative Development). She teaches creative writing and literature at St. Olaf College and is also a faculty member of the college’s Environmental Conversation program. She lives in Minneapolis on the west bank of the Mississippi near the Great River Road with her partner, the writer Rachel Moritz, and their son.

Reviews

[Carter Murphy]

The way Juliet was able to use her family’s history of suicide to touch on masculinity and the effects of U.S. coal mining blew me away.

Bought this on a complete whim, and highly recommend.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended by a friend at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival who was along for the decade-long ride of the book's production.

Situates a family history of suicide in a socioeconomic and ecological context, while remaining quite personal and tactile.

"Suicide-victim" refers to the impact suicide can have on those left behind.

"The person who commits suicide puts his psychological skeleton in the survivor's emotional closet -- he sentences the survivor to a complex of negative feelings and, most importantly, to obsessing about the reasons for the suicide death. . .

"In SOS: A Handbook for Survivors of Suicide, a pamphlet I was given after my father's death, the word 'survivor' carried both practical and metaphoric applications: 'The APA ranks the trauma of losing a loved one to suicide as 'catastrophic' -- on par with that of a concentration camp experience.' Late in life, [Edwin] Schneidman . . . formulated a guiding principle for a good death, an approach that keeps these survivors in mind. 'I would offer, as a beginning, the following Golden Rule for the dying scene: Do unto others as little as possible . . . Have your dying be a courtly death, among the best things that you ever did." (187).

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

What could be more sobering--and downright frightening--than contemplating one's family legacy of suicide, times three? Poet Juliet Patterson here sets out to demystify the circumstances and rationales behind each of a trio of family deaths decades ago: her father's, and both her grandfathers', all by their own hand. Each man turned out to be far more than a sum of his contrasting parts, and Ms. Patterson's exhaustive and productive journalistic research throughout smalltown Midwest libraries and records centers, like her dogged pursuit of fellow surviving relatives' reminiscences--often released in guarded or downright miserly snippets--serves only to open yet more unanswered questions for her consideration and speculation. Even the Kansas earth itself, tainted precariously by years of ruthless mining, becomes a possible suspect in these deaths. (The "Sinkhole" of the title turns out to be a quite literal one in this book, and not just a visceral image of one woman's painful slog through generations of acute family pain.) Ms. Patterson's is a very poignant quest, so eloquently fleshed out as other key life markers, such as the birth of her lovingly-awaited baby son, make their own urgent pleas for her energy and attention. It is hard to look away from this book, not at all in the ambulance-chaser sense, but in its stark honesty and profound feeling. A powerful, unflinching read.

[chayce cornette · Rating 5 out of 5]

i found this to be a refreshingly relatable portrayal of grief, and also of parent/child relationships. the quiet wonderings and the finding-of-answers to questions never asked. i appreciated the reflections on her mother and grandmothers varied responses to loss and widowhood- garbage bags stacked on the curb, the ritualized care of a watch. i thought the commentary on future grieving we have yet to do as we “careen toward ecological disaster” was beautifully done- the contemplation of a sinkhole in the ground, a picnic upon a chat pile and what this means for our individual past and our collective future.

“I thought of the women in my family and the credit they deserve for surviving; they had tolerated the same lives the men had, lived through the grief of their deaths, and endured. I thought of Alta Faye, Leah, and my mother—all widows of suicide. Even if I didn't always understand their stoicism, I could see now their inner strength, their will to go on. Whatever I had inherited from the men in my family, I had inherited things from these women too. From Alta Faye, I inherited the powers of shrewd observation; from Leah, a calm disposition; and from my mother, a creative spirit. I went to sleep that night with all of them on my mind.”

[Louisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up at the library as part of an attempt to read more nonfiction. I expected a little narrative on each of the three deaths followed by analysis of causes, research analysis, and hypotheses about different strategies for living and making sense of the world as a family member of a person or people who died by suicide. Instead I found Ms. Patterson’s journey into family history, family geography, and studies of how she and her family coped with each suicide. In short, a research based narrative rather than a scholarly presentation. This presentation suits me better than a scholarly one would have done. The author opens with her father’s suicide while she was recovering from a particularly horrendous car accident. She has to cope with her own limited endurance and her partner’s miscarriage at the same time that her father chose to end his life. He had made preparations to assist his wife and daughter to transition their lives without him, including a binder of instructions, a paid life insurance policy, and a suicide note. Still, nothing ever fully prepares anyone to assume all the responsibilities left when a loved one dies, and knowing that the death was a choice adds an additional burden. After her father died, the author has questions as to whether her father was more likely to die by suicide because both his father and his wife’s father died similarly. Though the methods were different, the choice and consequences were common to all three deaths. Juliet Patterson delves into family history, the town where all three men lived, and causative agents, and relates them in a knowledgeable yet conversational format. Her journey is interesting; her conclusions thought-provoking.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I decided to read this I didn’t think I would be able to say I “enjoyed” a book about a families dynasty of suicide but here we are. While reading I would find myself crying but also completely enthralled with the authors family history and how it was interwoven with the history of the cities and states they lived in. I can’t imagine doing the amount of research the author did while trying to heal from my father’s suicide but she was very thorough and it is well written. I appreciate her viewpoint into masculinity in the United States and the role that played not only in her families history of suicide but also for other men in America.

[Xochitl · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love personal/family histories and learning about how other people build a sort of personal archive. this makes me want to spend weeks or months researching my own family, and visiting all the places they’ve lived and considered home. there were moments where it def became more of a local history about the area her family is from, but it sort of tied itself together by the end. had to take some breaks, because of the way it reminded me of how grief exists within my family and how we all become survivors simply by inheriting that grief.

[blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

[audiobook]

i like it ! beautiful epilogue

[Debbie Hagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Juliet Patterson's "Sinkhole" is a fascinating, multi-layered book about suicide, family history, memory, and history of Kansas. Much of the book revolves around Pittsburg, Kan., just outside Joplin, where miners dug mazes of underground shafts to unearth coal, zinc, and lead. But once the mines were exhausted, they were abandoned. Then the earth began caving in, swallowing up homes and businesses.

Patterson uses the "sinkhole" as a metaphor for the inexplicable collapses she feels after both of her grandfathers and her father commit suicide. They are unexpected. They change the landscape of her life, and she has trouble closing these gaping holes.

Patterson researches sinkholes, mining, and suicide to make some sense of her family and the past. While I found the research interesting and applicable to the story, I also thought, at times, it slowed down the narrative a little.

Still a fascinating, enjoyable read.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Juliet Patterson has crafted a beautiful, sobering, occasionally harrowing account of the chain of suicides in her family: her father, his father, and her mother's father. Her mix of memoir, family history, and midwestern history is skillfully woven together into a spellbinding narrative. Highly recommended.

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heckuva book to finish reading on Christmas morning!

Patterson is a poet who's father killed himself in 2008. This was especially distressing give how both of Patterson's grandparents had also committed suicide. Yeah, this family has some baggage, and this book is the result of Patterson's attempts to process it - and her own life.

It's tricky because no one in her family ever talked about these things. Patterson only found out off-hand that her maternal grandfather killed himself on her fourth birthday. Her dad was often closed off, and hardly ever talked about his childhood - and certainly gave no indication that he was thinking of doing something like that.

This book doesn't come to any easy conclusions. On the one hand, that's frustrating as the book just kinda keeps going until it stops. (Patterson even flatly states in the conclusion that she doesn't know how to conclude it). On the other hand, good for it for not coming to any easy conclusions. There are none and who wants to read a book that ends on mindset of a frickin' Hallmark card?

She digs into not just the family's past, but the town her family came from: Pittsburgh, Kansas, an old mining town in the southeast corner of the state that's now pockmarked with sinkholes (serving as an overall metaphor and the book's title). She notes some aspects of masculinity that hurt the men in her family - be risk-taking (which can blow up in your face), don't tell others your problems (which can make them harder to bear). While the book focuses on her male forebearers, she also notes the resiliance of the women in her family, who survived it all and kept going on.

Ultimately, for Patterson the process of investigating her family history was more important than the result. It allowed her to come to terms with her dad's death and overall family legacy, even if those terms aren't always very clear. She's able to move on and survive it.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was struck by how this memoir was just as much about physical scars on the land - left by intense mining in the Kansas landscape of Patterson's family - as it was about the scars left by legacy of suicide within Patterson's family. When I read in the author's bio that she is a faculty member of St. Olaf's Environmental Conversation program, in addition to teaching literature and creative writing, it was like a final piece of a puzzle snapped into place. On its surface, this is a book about suicide and its impact on a family and on the author. It is remarkable how Patterson's reaction to her father's death is to immerse herself in research. This book is somehow both matter-of-fact and also deeply felt. We have scenes of the author picking apart the details of her family tree, diving into facts and research on suicide and mental health in America, along side the intense emotional reaction to the trauma of her father's death.

But more deeply, this is a book about legacy. The author fears the deadly legacy left to her by the men in her family, and the deadly legacy left to all of us and our children by capitalism's devastating impact on the environment. But it is also about the legacy of the women in Patterson's family, who have persevered through grief and hardship. And it hopefully leaves us with a message of hope of our own perseverance in the face of planetary disaster.

[J Macarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sinkhole is an easy-to-read hard-read. That is, I leaned into the "fluent and expressive" writing throughout, even when it was moving into harder-for-my-heart-to-take territory. Sinkhole is a beautifully written book, a beautiful and devastating memoir in which the author recognizes how precisely her "life had been deeply shaped by the past." One thing in the writing, among others, that is remarkable to me is how much Patterson takes care of the reader. There is a sensitive, intelligent, compassionate, and inclusive quality in her "private task of mourning." I feel the toll the researching and writing took on its author in reading the book. And yet there is a sense of triumph, if you will, having read the words Patterson wrote. Triumph might not be the exact word the author would use, but I imagine there is a word. Maybe the "devotion" she refers to in the last pages? I am deeply grateful for this book of shadows that catch and for Patterson's efforts "to drag them into the light, as best [she] could." There is relief in that. I'm grateful to Patterson for writing Sinkhole, for seeing and writing the memoir all the way through to a wholeness, and I'm grateful to have read this eloquent memoir written with "the force of language."

[Emily Rountree · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a book club pick, and the author was able to attend as well! I felt so lucky to be able to hear her speak about her work and her process writing this beautiful memoir about her grieving process following her father's suicide. Both of her parents also experienced the death of their fathers by suicide in Pittsburg, Kansas (my hometown), so Patterson travels to Pittsburg to research her family's history in search of connection to these men and meaning in her father's death. The book explores the history of Pittsburg, her own family, and lets the reader in on her grieving process in such an open and honest way.

I was absolutely blown away by her depth of research into southeast Kansas and the way she seamlessly intertwines this complex history of this heavily mined area with her own reflections. It is not a self-help book, nor does it have a resolution where she wraps up her grief with a tidy bow. Instead, she realistically shows the messy and non-linear process of grief, especially after such a traumatic death. I loved this book and really treasured being able to hear Patterson's thoughts about her work. Highly recommend.

[Rick Ramacier · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I have read in quite sometime. The writing is brave, strong, and lyrical. It is multi-layered and will appeal to readers in different ways on different levels. While "Sinkhole" A Legacy of Suicide" is about the very difficult subject of suicide, it is about much more too. The story artfully and engagingly weaves in some of the under appreciated history of SE Kansas from early days of the last century that make connections to our present troubling ecological, sociological, and economic conditions. It does this through some incredibly vulnerable writing about the Author's family. It is here where I think the Author shines. Her family stories are moving and open. By brining us inside of her family and talking about what we unfortunately avoid, we can learn more about ourselves, families and the people in our lives. Perhaps with more honesty and openness. I was saddened, yet inspired and finally grateful for this book.

[Kelly Dwyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

SINKHOLE is a moving and impressive book about the legacy of suicide.
The structure of the book moves between scenes, research, and ruminations, and the author Juliet Patterson moves between these sections with elegance and thoughtfulness.
The author writes about her father's death with such delicacy and paints a beautiful picture of him. His suicide note was just heartbreaking. She writes about her grandfathers and other family members with equal interest and delicacy.
Juliet Patterson ties in the town in which her father lived and in which her family came from with the literal sinkhole caused by human destruction, creating a metaphor that I feel will stay with me for a long time.
This is a beautiful book, and, as the research about suicide in the book reminds us, an important one as well.

[Gina Palandri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a masterpiece. While the topic of suicide does not get spoken about much and lives in the dark, the fact that the author was able to reveal and share with us not only her own father's suicide but also the suicides of both her grandfathers. And also let us as readers learn about their lives and how the impact of the environment (coal mining) was a possible legacy thread running through all 3 family suicides. It kept me very engaged and I was so moved by the store I read it twice.  Highly recommend! The research and data and genealogy were amazing to read and yes, we know why "Sinkholes" exist now more by reading this book.  I'd love to see Terry Gross ( Fresh Air/NPR) interview the author, as it would be a great interview!

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poet writes about how she researched the suicides of her father and both of her grandfathers in order to understand better what drove them to such drastic actions. Though the account is highly personal and provides a great deal of family history, it also explores suicide from a philosophical, psychological, and cultural perspective. I struggled with the book's organization, which I _think_ was meant to be loosely associative, like the mind of someone grieving? Rather than explore one suicide and move to the next, Patterson explores the three intermittently and weaves personal details in as they occur to her. Plaintive, thoughtful, with interesting analogies. Recommended for readers who enjoy personal essays, especially on grief and death.

[Kristen Froebel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The luminous and life affirming journey that Juliet Patterson takes the reader on with Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide, turned out to be a brilliant read for the dark days of mid-winter. The heart beat at the center of her inquiry into her family history is a fierce twinned energy of generosity and restraint. There is no other book like this. Having been robbed of people I loved by their suiciding, I was cautious in my approach but once I started the book I read it in a day. I came away from my immersion in Juliet Patterson's compelling wrestle with her urgent questions of life and death comforted, inspired and educated.

[Bill Thorness · Rating 5 out of 5]

The metaphor of a “sinkhole” describes so well the deep and enduring feeling of losing a loved one. Patterson’s observations and writing are grounded in the evocative imagery that comes from her being a poet. Her meditation on the tragic death of three men in her family contains echoes to larger cultural situations, psychological stressors and family dynamics. She probes the usefulness of genealogy and history, how deeply we might understand those who were lost or the grieving people they left behind, and how to fit that perspective into our lives. This book left me hopeful that I had gained a greater ability to handle tragedy.

[Margi Rogal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sinkhole is a remarkably candid telling of the suicides of Patterson's father and two grandfathers. In seeking to understand her relatives' suicides, Patterson reckons with her own physical crises and emotional challenges, with environmental degradation, and with the history and culture of towns in Kansas. In spite of the anguish caused by the loss of family members, Patterson remains calm and possessed, determined to probe, face demons, and move on with her life. Beautifully written, and revealing to anyone interested in how to live a meaningful life.

[Katie Nissly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel both haunted and steadied by Juliet Patterson's writing, Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide. I'm moved by the level of physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational labor she must have put in to integrating her family history... and then sharing her vulnerable and honest reflections with readers, which I found to be exquisitely written. What a treasure she has offered the world. This book is relevant to anyone interested in the complex layers of family function/dysfunction, suicide and mental dis-ease, and/or personal perseverance.

[Madelyn Postman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Juliet Patterson's narrative nonfiction novel is poignant and skilfully written. Though her research is obsessive (her own term for it), she never "info-dumps" and doesn't include extraneous information simply to show that she has done her homework. Patterson creates a narrative which follows her journey of trying to understand her the suicides of her father and both grandfathers, and how she comes to terms with grief, eventually living with it and looking toward the future. This is an important book which helps get suicide and its possible causes unflinchingly out into the open.

[Andrea Lorenz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A timely and important book. Patterson investigates the pattern of suicide in her family after her father's death by suicide. She weaves history and research into her personal reflections and experience, written elegantly. As a nonfiction book, this reminded me in style of We Keep the Dead Close, another beautifully written book about the legacy left to someone in the wake of their death.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every page of SINKHOLE is transformative with valuable reflections on grief, loss, and love. The prose carries an honesty and a willingness to see that fundamentally helped me address my own grief and loss in which I've long struggled. Patterson's ability to weave very difficult threads of personal loss with a larger look at environments--social, cultural, and ecological--offers a powerful lens and approach for writers and readers alike. Do not delay in reading this book.

[Edy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible story of a daughter's quest for answers in the wake of her father's suicide. Her search for understanding leads her to the realization that both of her grandfathers died by suicide as well. Patterson's saga of paternal suicide is described in a matter-of-fact tone that is never weepy nor falsely dramatic. Patterson is a poet and she uses a delicate, descriptive style that allows the reader to ponder, process and comprehend the devastating act of suicide.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book particularly moving as I read it while visiting Pittsburg, Kansas, my husband’s hometown. We were there to memorialize his brother, who had died a month before. Pittsburg is unique. It is a small coal mining town in the southeast corner of Kansas, and as my father-in-law explained to me, the only time I met him, the entire town is undermined. I came to understand that word in an entirely new way as he meant that the shafts of abandoned mines tunneled underneath many of the houses in the neighborhood. Some of those houses had fallen into those “sinkholes. Soon after her own father’s suicide, Patterson goes back to this town to research the lives, and deaths of her two grandfathers who also committed suicide. So of course, the sinkholes represent the emotional cratering in her family as two generations endure suicide. It is a moving and eloquent book.

[Trish Zimmerman]

Do you have any places that are both "a diversion and a shrine"? This book has so many contemplative links of landscape, memory and meaning. A creek, a sinkhole, quests that take strangers to small towns in OK, investigating family secrets and bridge dimensions as spiritual practice during grief. This book settles into you.

[Lorette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Patterson attempts to make sense of her family legacy of suicide, while most acutely grieving her father and recovering from some medical maladies. Its not an entirely cohesive account, just yet.

[Stacey]

Recommended by Margaret Renkl, on Twitter