Undead - by Madeline Vosch (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A revealing memoir about the complicated truths of surviving a suicide attempt and rethinking the concept of "suicide prevention" to create a world that people want to live in

Madeline Vosch did everything she was supposed to do when the suicidal thoughts started. Or she tried. Between studying, working three jobs to make rent, navigating the impossible bureaucracy of Boston's welfare system to access food stamps and nominally affordable mental health care, there was not a moment she was not fixated on survival. One night in April 2018, weeks before her graduation from Harvard Divinity school, she walked home from a party with a single intention: to take as many pills as she could stomach, and never wake up.

But then she did. And she was left with a question: what now?

In Undead, Vosch deftly weaves together lyric prose, memoir, and cultural commentary to tell the story of what happens after a suicide attempt. Here, she sets off on a journey to find her kindred spirits in surviving the end of a story, investigating the various scripts she encountered in the weeks and months after her attempt--from other works of art that touch on the topic of suicide, to Christian theology, to medical texts, to episodes of ER, to the news cycle as reports of increased suicide rates confirmed her suspicion: she was not alone in her attempt, even if she had no one to talk to about what came after. She might be changed, but what did that matter if the world that had ground her down wasn't?

Vosch turns the concept of "suicide prevention" on its head, asking what it might look like to reconceive suicidality as a response to a social problem. She challenges us to incorporate "prevention" into a larger social vision that intersects with increased access to housing, to food, to healthcare--in short, creating a world that people can and want to live in.

Review Quotes

"Harrowing, completely without flinch, Madeline Vosch's Undead may be the most uncomfortably human book I've ever read. And so beautifully written: What did it feel like, the coming back? It felt like rooting in the leaves for months, mouth to the ground, eyes in the dirt, searching for anything at all that could guide me forward. Any time a writer is able to recount hard times, this recounting is, in itself, proof of endurance; here, we are not provided too much reassurance, however ( . . . there in my mind, tossing, daily, is the question: Is it okay that I lived?), and the questions and provocations will trouble any reader long after they finish reading. This book! So straight, exasperated, ongoing, a testament and a call to understanding."
--Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment

"Madeline Vosch's Undead is a rare, ferocious memoir--scrappy, brilliant, and impossible to put down. Part cultural autopsy, part personal history of surviving suicide, it crackles with the gothic voltage of Frankenstein. Vosch's laboratory is America: a surreal land populated by menacing Midwestern pastors, ivory towers always out of reach, and the blur of too many back-to-back shifts. A book like a primal scream, this one will pull you back to life."
--Greg Marshall, author of Leg

"A brave, honest, and really quite magnificent book that will save lives. It's very hard and absolutely necessary to describe how the suicidal mind works. If you struggle with suicidal ideation, love someone who does, or have lost someone to suicide, you will be helped by reading this book. Thank you, Madeline Vosch. We need you."
--Clancy Martin, author of How Not to Kill Yourself

"This is a book that wants to speak the unspeakable. Vosch's journey into the underworld is a confrontation with a life that feels unworkable, with a crushing class system, and with the tenuousness of our bonds of community and friendship. In tracing her path into and out of suicide, Vosch avoids traditional narratives of recovery in favor of a reckoning: with the self, with the world that shaped us, and with what, precisely, we're afraid to talk about when we talk about suicide."
--Celia Bell, author of The Disenchantment

"Madeline Vosch's Undead is a taut, clear-eyed reckoning with the strange afterlives of a suicide attempt--what is to be done when you come back, like Lazarus, from the land of the dead. She enters a powerful line of women writers--Kaysen, Plath, Kavan, and Carrington, among them--on psych wards, death wishes, and bad dads, but writes, too, for the people who navigate these precarious worlds 'with no safety nets, ' for those 'whose stories continued without a road map.' I'll echo what a woman in the outpatient facility once told Vosch: I'm so glad she--and her writing--are still here."
--Jamie Hood, author of Trauma Plot: A Life

"Every succinct descriptor I've reached for to describe Undead feels not quite right because the book troubles these concepts. Heartbreaking? Revelatory? Profound? Urgent? Yes! But what else? This exploration of self and history that are impossible to disentangle from our harsh world systems is a journey that Vosch goes on with rigor and earnestness and curiosity. This story is a hand stretched out, an invitation to belonging, an undead woman wielding the power of telling."
--'Pemi Aguda, author of Ghostroots

About the Author

Madeline Vosch is a writer, a translator, and a professor. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, the Washington Post, and The Rumpus, among others. She was awarded the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Award for Nonfiction and was an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow.