When my father died by suicide in 2008, I was unexpectedly flung into a personal investigation of his death, and also of the legacy of suicide within my ancestral line. His marked the third suicide in my immediate family: both of my grandfathers had also died by their own hand, a truth that my parents rarely discussed when I was growing up. I knew little about these men as a consequence—after my father died, I felt compelled to learn more. But how to do it? And where to begin? As I began writing material for what would eventually become my memoir, Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide, I found myself puzzling over how to craft a narrative from such a fragmented family history. 

I came to nonfiction after years of writing poetry, and as a writer driven primarily by image and sound, I wasn’t an intuitive storyteller. To conceive of the book, I had to rely almost entirely on my intuition, which meant allowing myself to stray from the limited scope of my family’s story. Place became an important anchor for the book, and with it, research into the history of a single region of southeastern Kansas that came to stand for some part of our family inheritance. To think through the narrative structure, I looked for inspiration in other books that were inventive and genre-bending. 

The list of books below are titles I read before, during, and after the completion of my own memoir. I think of them as companions. These books uniquely tackle the subject of…