Hot Off the Shelf: Sinkhole by Juliet Patterson
[image description: The book cover of Sinkhole has an orange background with a collage of parts of family photos and newspaper articles put together in the shape of a downward pointing cone. The title is written to look like it’s been scratched into the surface of the book.]
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review and I honestly LOVED it. If you’d like a copy for yourself or someone you love, there’s an affiliate link at the bottom of the page.
Content Warning: suicide and its resulting trauma
I’ve loved reading memoirs for a long time, but over the past couple of years, I’ve developed a particular fondness for reported memoirs. Yes, give me fascinating, juicy personal stories but ground them in a larger issue that makes me see the world in a new light. That’s exactly why I immediately knew I had to read Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide by Juliet Patterson.
–– And let me interrupt here to say that if you didn’t notice the content warning at the top, content warning: suicide. Proceed with caution. ––
Both suicide and sinkholes as metaphors resonate with me for deeply personal reasons, which I’ll definitely be getting into. First, the synopsis:
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 question: 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 father: 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.
I can’t tell you what Sinkhole means to me without telling you about my father, who died by shooting himself in the head in the spring of 2016. As far as parental deaths go, you could say I was lucky. He and I weren’t close; he and my mother divorced when I was 3 and he wanted little to do with me after that. I hadn’t even really seen him since I was 12, at his mother’s funeral where he showed up drunk or high or otherwise out of his mind. I decided I didn’t want him in my life after that, so I’d begun telling people who asked about him that he was dead.
Though technically a lie, it felt true to me because, essentially, he was dead to me. It’s also easier for a child to explain that their father is dead than to try to explain that he was too fucked up on drugs to want to be a dad. I always imagined that when I got the call that he’d actually died that I’d be relieved: suddenly my lie would become truth.
But hearing my uncle, grandfather, and mother tell me that my father was dead didn’t bring me anything but a sense of unsettling and dread. By that point, I’d been battling depression for over a decade and had tried to kill myself a few times, so instead of being relieved or even angry, I imagined this hurting man whom I barely knew in those final moments before pulling the trigger. I know how low I felt right before I decided not to kill myself and can only imagine how miserable something even lower might feel.
I’ve wondered so many times if he thought of me in those final moments and if, maybe, the fact that his only child didn’t speak to him because of the many ways he failed as a father was part of what inspired him to pull that trigger. I’ve gone to enough therapy to know that my father’s suicide is in no way my fault, but I can’t help wondering. If I’d been more patient, more empathetic, and more understanding of his own mental health and suffering, could I have convinced him to go to rehab? Might he still be alive today?
That last part is the part I leave out when I tell people that my father shot himself in the head. I don’t like people feeling sorry for me. I don’t like people weaponizing my trauma against me. Ironically, as I was finishing this book, I happened to be visiting one of my closest friends on a long-planned visit and that’s exactly what happened. In our extremely close friendship of five years, we’ve seldom argued, yet we fought on my visit.
Our argument was completely unrelated to anything involving my family, so imagine my mental and emotional whiplash when I person I trusted with the fact of my father’s suicide suddenly blurted out: “Yeah, and that stuff with your dad? Him shooting himself in the head? You need to deal with that. You need to go to therapy, like intense outpatient therapy, and fucking deal with it because that explains your self-destructive, martyr behavior.”
I didn’t expect one of the few people I trusted with my father’s suicide to weaponize it against me, especially considering that they have their own dead parent issues. And I especially didn’t expect to have someone I love(d) try to diagnose me with my father’s suicide during an argument that had nothing to do with parental issues. I won’t bore you with further details of that drama, but I’ll readily admit that I was not totally innocent in the argument either and I hope to never see or speak to this person again.
Nevertheless, I’m grateful for the experience because it made me realize that I can’t hide my father’s suicide like a skeleton in my closet of shame. Intellectually knowing that I’m not to blame for my father’s suicide is one thing, but truly internalizing it and being open about the fact that this is a thing I experienced and am comfortable sharing is quite another. And while I couldn’t possibly have planned for all this around my own father’s suicide to come about while reading Sinkhole, the events are now inextricably linked for me.
This is to say that I understand why Juliet Patterson took a decade to write this memoir and I understand that opening your family’s closet of skeletons for public consumption is an act of immense courage. Patterson is far braver than me. I only have my father’s suicide to grapple with, while she must grapple with her father’s and both of her grandfather’s––and she was much closer to her father than I ever was to mine. It isn’t that I believe pain or trauma is a competition or something to be ranked, but I feel I must acknowledge that her pain far surpasses my own.
Yet, I found myself jealous of Patterson. There was a paper trail for her to follow––a literal paper trail of suicide notes, newspaper articles, files, and other items that either belonged to the deceased or were about them. I don’t own a single thing that once belonged to my father, I have no pictures of us together, and the only pictures I have of him were posted by other people on his online obituary page. As far as I know, there was no suicide note and he didn’t do anything remarkable enough to get a mention in any newspaper outside of a birth, marriage, and death announcement. He was a wholly unremarkable man, and one I barely knew.
While I don’t doubt that untold amounts of pain were dredged up in Patterson’s research process, particularly her trips to her parents’ hometown of Pittsburg, the landscape of which is now polka-dotted with crumbling sinkholes, a part of me can’t help wondering what it would be like to have archives with information about my father left for me to find.
But that is my own issue to sort through, not Patterson’s. It would be unreasonable to expect or even hope that a book about a writer’s father’s suicide would offer answers for me simply because I’m a writer whose father also killed himself. I know well that the job of the artist is to speak your pain and make meaning from it, mostly for yourself––and if others find that your work resonates with them, that’s a bonus. Just as I don’t want the demand of my writing to provide life-shattering answers for someone else, I refuse to have that unreasonable expectation for Patterson.
And yet, even as I wasn’t looking for meaning, I found it in Sinkhole. Note that I said I found meaning, not answers. If anything, I have more questions than ever about my father’s suicide, but I feel better able to address it, even despise of––or perhaps because of––the confrontation with my (former) friend. The facts of your life can only hurt you if you carry them with shame. I hadn’t realized I felt shame about my father’s suicide, but I don’t think the former friend’s comment would have struck me like it did if there wasn’t some truth to it.
In another twist of irony, I finished Sinkhole while falling asleep on that former friend’s cramped loveseat. In the morning, I had a feeling of resolution: I would probably never see this person again (which is fine) but their parting gift was the resolve to never let anyone kick me while I’m down, especially not over a trauma so deeply personal. In their insistence that I hadn’t addressed my father’s suicide, they forced me to address it and by a small miracle, I had the perfect book to support me through it. Against all odds, I walked out of my former friend’s apartment feeling hopeful because I knew I’d never again let someone use my father against me or kick me when I’m down.
On the surface, it might seem like Patterson chose the metaphor of sinkholes to describe suicide because her parents’ hometown is riddled with them. Entire houses in Pittsburg have sunk into the earth, some as quickly as just a few hours or a few days. But the connection is more than the literal landscape. Suicide is a kind of sinkhole––it happens spontaneously, opening a hole of grief that you can’t see the bottom of. You don’t know how deep the sinkhole is or whether it will deepen or widen further. They are unpredictable and can swallow the trappings of life, including an entire person, in one gaping maw.
The South, where I grew up and where my father was born, is becoming more and more riddled with sinkholes too. At one point, when I was in college, there seemed to be a news article every week about a sinkhole opening up somewhere. One, in particular, haunts me to this day: A man in Florida was asleep in his bedroom when the floor fell out from under him and he was plunged more than 150 feet into a sinkhole. Rescuers were unable to find him. I don’t like thinking about what his final moments must have been like.
Suicide is a kind of sinkhole, but it’s not the only part of living that fits the metaphor. I’ve come to think of my friendship with that former friend as a kind of sinkhole too. Everything was great until it wasn’t and maybe there was always a hole opening beneath us or maybe our falling out was truly spontaneous. The details are less important to me than the facts: Once something has fallen into a sinkhole, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get them back.
Another irony: During my visit with this friend, before our falling out, we did a ritual in which we sat under a full moon on the shore of Lake Michigan and wrote something we wanted to let go of on a bay leaf. We then burned the bay leaf in a glass jar and tossed the ashes into the lake. I was having trouble thinking of what I wanted to let go of, but I had a sinking feeling that something was weighing me down. It turns out mine was twofold: the shame around my father’s suicide and this friend. Whether it was the spell in the ritual or just life carrying on in its ever-forward course, I feel purged now.
I may not know when the next sinkhole will come, but I’ll be better prepared for it. The thing about survivors of suicide is that our grief is stigmatized, which makes healing more difficult than it needs to be. Consider this book review my confession: Someone you know and love is a survivor of suicide. Someone you know and love is likely hiding this fact of their lives and that’s not a weight they should have to carry. Someone you know and love deserves to be free of this burden; deserves to let go.
