By Philip Connors

All the Wrong Places is an affecting and wryly funny memoir that details the author’s complex relationship with his brother and his struggle to cope with his brother’s death by suicide.

By Nancy Rappaport

Child psychiatrist Nancy Rappaport lost her mother to suicide at age four. Encouraged by her own children’s curiosity about their grandmother and fortified by her professional training in psychiatry, she began to look into her mother’s life and death. Drawing on court papers, newspaper clippings, her mother’s unpublished novel, and interviews with family and friends, Rappaport explores the impact of her mother’s suicide from the perspective of a daughter, psychiatrist, wife, and mother herself.

By Lynn Keane 

Give Sorrow Words is a lyrical, empathic exploration of a family’s tragedy that further illuminates the urgent need to end the stigma associated with depression and stands as a testament to the raw beauty of family experience and offers hope that we can survive even when the worst has happened. Lynn Keane’s memoir will enlighten and present readers with an honest portrait of a family in grief.

By Mary Stimming and Maureen Stimming

Survivor accounts of loss, grief, and resolution following a parent’s suicide by adult children. Separate sections offer perspectives on the deaths of mothers and fathers. Includes the reflections of four siblings on the shared loss of their mother.

By Susan Auerbach

This intimate memoir tells the story of a mother’s grief journey in the wake of her son’s suicide.  In the words of Dr. Jack Jordan, an international authority on suicide loss, the book is also “helpfully organized around themes and issues that survivors will inevitably encounter, such as the bodily impact of suicide loss and guilt and responsibility. Who should read this book? Anyone who has lost a loved one to suicide; … anyone who wishes to support a suicide loss survivor; and above all, any and every mother who has lost a child to suicide.”

By Sara Swan Miller

This book combines interviews with more than thirty sibling survivors all over the U.S. with the author’s own account of losing a sister to suicide.

By Christopher Lukas

As a young boy, Christopher (Kit) Lukas, co-author of Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide, survived the suicide of his mother. Neither he nor his brother were told how she died, and both went on to confront their own struggles with depression, a disease that ran in their family. In 1997, Kit’s brother Tony, a Pulitzer-prize winning author, took his own life. Blue Genes is Kit’s exploration of his family history, his personal journey, and his determination to find strength and hope.

By Joan Wickersham

Joan Wickersham’s artful memoir traces her search to understand her father’s suicide through interactions with friends, doctors, and other loss survivors. An unflinching and moving exploration of the complexity of losing a loved one to suicide and the necessary search for why.

By Carla Fine

Drawing on the experience of losing her husband to suicide and subsequent interviews with scores of suicide loss survivors, as well as the expertise of counselors and mental health professionals, Carla Fine provides invaluable guidance to the families and friends who are left behind in the aftermath of a suicide.

By Deena Baxter

This is the story of how a stepmother—an unusual perspective in loss memoirs—deals with the suicide death of her stepson while trying to maintain some sense of normalcy. Baxter combines humor with serious self-reflection to create a beautifully written book about the impact mental illness has on a person, and about the ways in which the author coped shortly after her loss.  The memoir is emotional, yet also very matter-of-fact on the subjects of suicide and mental illness.  Recommended for people who are several years removed from their loss.