Customer Reviews

In Her Wake: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother's Suicide

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In Her Wake is a terrific book - I highly recommend it.

I had a hard time putting it down - and that says a lot! (Though I am a former high school English teacher, I often start books and if they don't grab me within 30 pages I have a hard time completing them.)

In Her Wake grabbed me on multiple levels - the drama of the large and complex family, the author/narrator's search for all she could learn about her mother who committed suicide when the author was 4, the impact of divorce and custody battles on individuals and a family and a psychiatric look at suicide. It was a great mix of a personal narrative coupled with psychiatric facts and anecdotes from the child psychiatrist/author's experiences with kids and families.

Though you might worry that a book that centers on a mother's suicide would be depressing, quite the opposite is true. In Her Wake is actually uplifting - demonstrating the power of family (in all of its forms) to recreate itself in support of its members, and the power of people to persevere and thrive through tough experiences. Rappaport does a great job of bringing you with her on her search for her mother, and the growth that that search allows for her and for others. It is a profoundly personal view into a family - and it leaves us all wiser and more understanding for having read it.

THIS IS AN ENGROSSING BOOK - GO BUY IT AND TRY IT FOR YOURSELF.

This unabashed account of a daughter's lifetime of coping with the reality of losing her mother by suicide at a tender age is rendered with the tenderness of a true healer and the precision of a modern doctor. It runs unapologetically through a kaleidescope of emotional and practical responses of a survivor struggling to understand why and how a beloved family member could be driven to take her own life.
Anyone who has suffered the loss of a family member, through suicide or other means, will be brought from tears to laughter, you'll find yourself smiling cynically at painful truths and celebrating life. The true gift in this book, though, is to the surviving family members of those who have committed suicide. To have this level of transparency and honesty shared poignantly by an obviously gifted writer and doctor is an offer not to be refused. Rappaort's decades of experience piecing together emotionally shattered children shines through every page, and you'll close the book a different person than the one who opened it.

In this remarkable book, Nancy Rappaport calls on her extensive training and experience as a child psychiatrist as she combs through secret journals, public records and painful memories to understand her own mother's suicide, which occurred when she was only four years old. She shares the stories of five generations of her prominent Boston family, as well as anecdotes from her many patients and scenes from her own therapy, to demonstrate how people cope with and understand mental illness and loss. Rappaport's thoughtful, eloquent book shows that while it is unbearably difficult to survive the loss of a loved one to suicide and to try to understand it, it is possible to nonetheless live a happy, productive and meaningful life. It inspires us to find meaning in the tragedy of loss and illness and carry it with us, but not allow it to define our lives.

So many parallels ... like the author, Nancy Rappaport, I grew up in the sixties (about 9 years before her), and went with my family to Expo `67 in Montreal. Like Nancy's mother, my mother had children (but only three not six) and worked outside of the home at a time when that was not the thing to do. Like Nancy's, the home I grew up in was filled with marital tension, one day escalating to the point that my dad threw a flower pot at my mom. Like Nancy's dad, my dad had a bit of a temper. One day when her three children were 5, 4, and 2, despondent over her marriage and the family's money problems, my mom decided to end her life. She parked her car on the railroad tracks, waiting for a train to end her misery. Unlike Nancy, I was lucky ... my mom did not follow through with her impulse. As the train barreled down the tracks toward her car, a vision of our faces appeared to her and she drove off the tracks with just a few minutes to spare.

Perhaps because of my own childhood, I couldn't put this book down until I had turned to the very last page. Memories of the past swished by me like yard ornaments in a hurricane ... events and feelings I had forgotten in the haste of everyday living. Having never been to a psychiatrist or psychologist, I benefitted from the therapy indirectly provided by this prominent psychiatrist. I now understand my repetitive childhood nightmares, my own adolescent depression, and why my parents' marriage had to end, which it did just a few months after I grew up and moved away.

This story of a woman's quest to find out why her mother ended her life is more intriguing than any best-selling paperback novel. Although I had never heard much about the family, I imagine my father-in-law (now deceased) ... who grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, knew the family name well. Politically prominent and financially well-off, the Rappaports' made the news many times in the Boston area, as well as appearing in the March 1952 edition of Redbook magazine.

Without spoiling the surprises unveiled in this memoir, by reading this book you will learn why suicide seems to run in families, why an overdose of pills does not make you gently go to sleep forever, and what one characteristic makes people more inclined to kill themselves (and it isn't the level of depression). I often think how different I would have turned out had my mom not been around to help me through my childhood, inspiring my optimism and determination. I now understand why Nancy Rappaport couldn't rest easy until she had turned every leaf in her quest to learn more about her mother. Like me, I wouldn't be surprised if Nancy sometimes wonders how she would have been different had her talented and brilliant mother persevered instead of succumbing to the darkness of depression.

I just finished reading In Her Wake and I found out there are many views here.
But most of all I found something a mother who might suffer from depression might
gain..Insight into what you'd leave behind if you took your own life. I don't even think you'd have to be a mother or father to feel this message. The message being the people who love and care about you will feel. I think through it all that's something that can matter. Her father's scepticism about digging up the past seems irrellevant. I believe in having an open mind and knowing details before I make assumptions. I think it was written well and very interesting. A must read!
I know it's a topic most of us like to avoid, but I think it's important.

Definitely a wonderful master piece. The author describes in a lovely way her thirst for understanding her mom's suicide, at the same time that shares with us her family history and way to cope with this sad incident. The family history, the author's experience as a professional psychiatrist, her research and her need to understand the family tragedy that shape her destiny really glued me to this book. Every page that I read would invite me to read the next one.
At the end of the book I was proud of the author, proud of her strength to share with us every chapter. This book is a MUST READ, for every person who is interested in learning and reading about resilience, family strength, forgiveness and faith in life and in those who we love.

There are many reasons to read this book. One can read it for it's graceful and cogent writing and the unfolding chapters each with a different focal person. It can be read as a family saga across generations and multiple marriages, births, and divorces seen through the lens of a tragic event, the suicide of the author's mother. It can be read as a window back into Boston of the 1950',60's and 70's. It affords a view into the history of psychiatric illness and treatment and changing social mores regarding emotional trauma. It can also be read as a very empathic window into the world of families who have lost a loved one to suicide.

Each family member is respectfully, yet vividly, drawn from interviews close to the present time while the writer delves back to the memories of forty plus years past. Thus, it is also a book about memory.

Suicide is a scary subject. For many people suicide is unspeakable. Nancy Rappaport eloquently demonstrates that we can safely put words to the confusuon,the pain and the irreconcilable contradictions suicide raises for all whom it touches. This is not a scary book, it is human and comforting, a very satisfying book to read.

This is the kind of reading that I, an English instructor of many years, get most engaged in: non-fiction, written with a literary sensibility, that weaves family stories and psychological content. Rappaport's book delivers all these things in abundance.

I loved how the book wove together the author's present life as a psychiatrist and mother, with the story of the courage it took her to break the family silence around her own mother's suicide. I was very involved with all of that, but I also found myself engaging on another level. As I read, I was finding myself pulled back and forth between a kind of infatuation with what seemed like the author's idyllic childhood (a Louisa May Alcott strand of her background: a prominent New England upbringing, many siblings, a big house surrounded by woods and graced with a swimming pool, the value on great education and political discussions) and the reminder that all of that was shot through, indelibly, with the legacy of her mother's suicide. Reading this book, I was amazed that, during the same era that I was growing up lonely and alienated in a boring and colorless New York City suburb, a woman of my generation was coming of age with so much "action" and "unconventionality" around her--a house full of siblings, the drama of step-families bonding and separating, and the troubling secrecy of beloved mother's death.

For its literary qualities and psychological depth, In her Wake is a book that will be remembered by all students of the human heart.

Nancy Rappaport was four years old when her mother committed suicide in 1963. The question anyone asks of someone who has taken his/her own life is "why?" Why would a mother of six take her own life? After years of not speaking about their mother's death, Nancy takes on the task of talking to her siblings to determine the answer to the question "why?" Nancy's children want to know about their deceased grandmother. A saga of generations of complexities evolves that reads like an unsolved mystery.

What would make a mother who seemed to "have it all" kill herself? Nancy relies on interviews, articles, and photographs to discover the woman behind the self-destruction. Nancy reads between the lines of court documents and personal diaries to reveal decades of secrets, and she narrates the unfolding story like an emotionally charged archeology expedition.

Nancy carefully constructs the story of a life, death, and the aftermath with continuity, clarity, and originality. This is a book well-written within the confines of tough subject matter, and without the full approval of her family members. Nancy unearths the conflicts within a prominent family, as well as the details of custody battles and financial settlements. She faces the differing perspectives and memories of her family members regarding the same events. These are challenges for anyone seeking the truth.

It seems fitting that Nancy chose to be a child psychiatrist. She includes relevant cases in the book, weaving her past with their present, their personal with her profession. There is no cover of denial, and no evidence of self-pity. Her purpose must be to help others who have lost someone to face reality.

In Her Wake is recommended to anyone trying to understand a variety of aspects of suicide. It's also recommended as an example of the work it takes to develop a sense of self in the wake of suicide.

I just got back from California, and I am happy to say that this book was wonderful company on the trip. It is a beautifully written book; open and honest about the author's human experience, and that is a powerful thing to take ownership of. I think on some level we all can relate to this story. Taking ownership of what makes us who we are, accepting what we cannot change and focusing on the relationships in our lives that bring us joy is the message I got from the story.