HardcoverJill lost her sister Kim to suicide about 20 years ago. Kim was a young college student and Jill - older by a decade - was by then married and in a different state. The surviving sister tells us that she wants to uncover, to understand, why her sister made the decision to end her life. After reading, I'm pretty sure that Jill is probably the worst person to shed any light on Kim's choice.
1) She's too close to the victim to be useful in an objective capacity and too far to be useful in an insightful way. I feel like I could have done a much better job coming up with some real answers to "why" -- and I might have started with the full-length mirror on the refrigerator, mentioned in passing, as though it's a NORMAL THING that doesn't smack of pressure to be perfect.
2) It's more speculation that discovery. There's way too much "I imagine she thought blahblah" and "she may have said yadayada" and "perhaps she sucked in her stomach." This is supposed to be a history, not a novel.
3) It's self-serving. There's an icky feeling that Jill, someone who obviously barely knew her much younger sister, wants the attention squarely on Jill. Kim's pain is obviously Jill's gain as Bialosky puts several of her own poems in the text and -- yowza -- they're quite ungood. One of them actually caused me to guffaw as it spoke of "twentysome cats" and their "twentysome pairs of feet." Poor two-legged cats.
A waste of pages about a wasted life. Doubly tragic.
F
