Author of the week: Jill Bialosky

last updated 8 January 2015

For 20 years, Jill Bialosky, a poet, novelist, and book editor, has been trying to come to terms with her sister’s suicide, said Jane Ciabattari in TheDailyBeast.com. Kim, the youngest of Jill’s three siblings, ended her life at age 21 when she turned her car on in the garage and went to sleep after a night spent fighting with her boyfriend. Since that time, Bialosky says, she’s been writing about the tragedy “sideways,” through her characters or in poems. Recently, she decided to take a more direct approach. “It seemed to me the only way I could understand how she came to the decision to take her life,” she says, “was to re-create or capture her inner world.”

Bialosky’s memoir, History of a Suicide, attempts to reclaim Kim’s life from the shame that revolves around suicide, said David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. “I didn’t want my sister’s legacy to be about being a screwed-up kid. Because that wasn’t the experience,” she says. To write the book, she dug deep into Kim’s diaries. What she found was heartbreaking. “My plan now is to turn mean,” Kim wrote in one entry. “Blow-off my friends and family and make everyone hate me. If nobody cared then it would be so easy to leave.” Bialosky still sees no easy answers about Kim’s suicide. “People come to these quick generalizations,” she says. “Is it about shame? Is it about loneliness? Is it about self-esteem? But I’ve come to feel that it can’t just be that one experience. I think with young people, impulsivity is a part of it.”