51Y2P2n5X7L._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_Diagnosis—and its constant cousin, misdiagnosis—form the intertwining narrative strands of The Fine art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother'southward Suicide, which explores the storytelling and guesswork that oft surround mental and physical illness. It'southward a memoir near Gayle Brandeis coming to terms with her mother'south suicide, also as a detective narrative that follows her every bit she pieces together the puzzle of her mother's life and death. But, ultimately, information technology's also about how perhaps everything can't exist figured out. Perhaps the best nosotros tin can do is learn to alive at the intersection of uncertainty and dearest.

I take a personal stake in this memoir, since my father committed suicide several years agone. I understand viscerally how suicide survivors can exist left with a heady mix of guilt and confusion, and I sympathize with the drive to detect answers to the multitude of questions posed by this deeply traumatic result.

I, too, have been trying to write nearly my father's suicide, so I'm grateful for the emotional and literary guidance that Brandeis provides with her narrative. She maps out the territory, with its many pitfalls, its blind alleys and expressionless-end streets. Certainly, every suicide is different, but there are some shared features to the experience of many suicide survivors, and this memoir—perhaps ironically in its very specificity—explores those commonalities. She takes the reader'south hand in this narrative and assures u.s. that yep, with courage and creativity, stories of suicide can, and maybe must, be told.

Brandeis starts the book with a bluntness about her mother's decease that nosotros afterward learn took her a long time to achieve: "After my mom hangs herself, I become Nancy Drew." She explains that in the days following the death, she was looking for clues, evidence, answers. Every bit she says, "I put on a detective hat so I won't have to wear my girl hat, so I can bear combing through her house."

That emphasis on her attempts to solve a puzzle—to diagnosis what happened, based on the fragmented evidence left backside—is a theme that'south carried through the book. And, information technology turns out, that kind of effort to brand sense of the globe, the people one cares for, and ane's ain mind and torso, is something that Brandeis shares with her mother.

The book's shadow narrative, the story behind the story, involves a movie her mother was making near the stop of her life called The Fine art of Misdiagnosis, about her own and her daughters' experiences with a miscellany of physical and mental maladies that are, past turns, diagnosed, misdiagnosed, ignored, or fabricated entirely. Her female parent'south obsession with the illnesses of her daughters obscures her own developing and mostly undiagnosed ecosystem of mental affliction, which involves, amidst other symptoms, severe paranoia.

This book is a moving tribute to the ways Brandeis has inherited her mother's relentless curiosity about the earth and the people in it. As readers, we hear her female parent'south voice—sometimes literally, in the form of quotes from the pic's script—woven with the voice of Brandeis. And it'south impossible not to recognize the similarities between mother and daughter, and the ways that Brandeis, in searching for the reasons for her mother'southward suicide, replicates many of her female parent's patterns of truth-seeking and exploration. The principal deviation is that the daughter'due south narrative is firmly grounded in actual evidence, analysis, and clear-headed honesty. And for that reason, Brandeis is a trusted guide through the mysteries of her mother's life, as well as her own.

Ultimately, the book ends in a place of compassion, resolution, and acceptance. Brandeis visits the place where her mother killed herself—a garage at an flat building called Golden Oaks. On the way, she buys a rosebush called "Sun Flare," and she takes it to the flat complex. A woman at the front desk-bound tells Brandeis everything she knows about the solar day her mother died, and she assures her that she'll run across to it that the rose is planted in the courtyard.

Information technology'due south a touching moment, one that the memoir earns by detailing the years-long, complex journey that Brandeis takes to get there. The sweet open-endedness of this visit offers a reconciliation that'southward more vital and life-giving than any certainty always could. As she says, "I had idea visiting Golden Oaks would bring me to my knees. I idea I would exist wrecked by information technology; I thought I would be weeping so hard, I wouldn't be able to encounter the road as I collection away. I never imagined I would leave feeling and then low-cal, so clear, pelting delicious on my skin."

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Vivian Wagner is an associate professor of English language at Muskingum Academy in New Concur, Ohio. She's the writer of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and eight,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington), and a poetry collection, The Village (Kelsay Books). Visit her website at www.vivianwagner.net.