Kelle Groom "How to Live" in Conv./with Joan Wickersham "The Suicide Index"

Kelle Groom

Kelle Groom’s newest book is How to Live: a memoir-in-essays (Tupelo Press, October 2023). She is the author of the memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection, New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, and a Library Journal Best Memoir. An NEA Fellow in Prose, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction, and two-time Florida Book Award winner, Groom’s work appears in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, New England Review, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others. Her four poetry collections include Underwater City (University Press of Florida), Luckily, Five Kingdoms, and Spill (Anhinga Press). Groom is a nonfiction editor at AGNI Magazine.

“Kelle Groom is a navigator of the soul's voyage, from mooring to mooring, no matter the tumultuous seas. She is a writer of deepest heart and purest eye, who seizes you and takes you where she wanders. How to Live is one of the most beautiful books I know, a profound reckoning"

 — Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships

Joan Wickersham

Joan Wickersham is the author of four books, including The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has published essays and reviews in the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and the International Herald Tribune , and she has contributed on-air essays to National Public Radio. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo.

A daughter's moving account of her father's suicide and its impact on her surviving family members--"beautiful...bleak, strong, and fiercely honest" (The Washington Post) One winter morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham's father shot himself in the head. How could the man she knew and loved have killed himself? Unless maybe she never really knew her father at all? His death made a mystery of his entire life. Using an index--that most formal and orderly of structures--Wickersham explores this chaotic and incomprehensible reality. Every bit of family history, plus each encounter with friends, doctors, and other survivors, exposes another facet of elusive truth. Dark, funny, sad, and gripping, at once a philosophical and a deeply personal exploration, The Suicide Index is, finally, a daughter's anguished, loving elegy to her father that no reader will soon forget.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

300 Pier 4 Blvd., 300 Pier 4 Boulevard, Boston, United States