"In One Friday in April , Donald Antrim describes the sickness that is suicide and the anguish of self-annihilation in crisp, vivid prose that is free of self-pity or self-aggrandizement. The book chronicles his experience at the brink, but it also describes the larger face of how little we really know of suicide and its multiplicity of causes, and how little we understand of our agency over our own lives or deaths. It is a compelling, heart-breaking, and redemptive read and it shimmers in its narratives of both loss and hope."
"[An] engrossing, necessary book—part memoir, part philosophical treatise... [An] intimate testimony from someone who has lived through an illness long shrouded in silence, shame and sin... Antrim’s inventive, circular prose style reflects his sense of warped time: Hours bend, fragment, compress, extend... One hopes this brief, courageous book will bring us closer to the 'paradigm shift' Antrim seeks."
"A profound, courageous, compassionate masterpiece that will, I think and I hope, change the way we think about suicide forever. What Antrim brings powerfully to bear in this inspiring and essential book is the great writer’s habits of precision and unwavering honesty. This book is an act of generosity; Antrim is trying to tell us something deeply true not just about the suicidal, but about all of us; about our culture, about the way we live, about how we might lead better, more authentic, more connected lives."
"[With] an unflinching portrait of his psychosis, hospitalization and treatment...Antrim aims not only to destigmatize mental illness but also to strip away the hushed-whispers mystery surrounding suicide."
People Magazine - Sandra Sobeiraj Westfall
"Bracing... A heart-rending and edifying portrait of the pain of mental illness."
07/12/2021
“A depression is a concavity, a sloping downward and a return. Suicide, in my experience, is not that,” writes MacArthur genius and novelist Antrim (Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World ) in this unflinching interrogation of the “social disease” he struggled with for more than a decade. Using his own experience to challenge traditional narratives around suicide, he argues it isn’t an “act or a choice” but instead “a long illness... with origins in trauma and isolation... violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging.” In 2006, just before publishing a memoir about his late abusive, alcoholic mother, Antrim came close to, as he puts it, letting himself fall from the fire escape of his four-story apartment building. Four months in a psychiatric institute followed, where, as Antrim relates in lucid prose, he underwent electroconvulsive therapy (it worked, but didn’t keep him out of the hospital long). “Dying in psychosis, in isolation from others, takes place in a kind of eternity,” he observes, as the text—which melts the past and present down into exhaustive lists of his grievances and questions around mental illness—mirrors the psychological “paralysis of suicide.” The light at the end of this painfully eloquent tunnel is the conclusion that no one should venture through the darkness alone. Readers looking to better understand the nuances of mental illness would do well start with this profoundly affecting account. (Oct.)
"One Friday in April evokes, as vividly as any book since William Styron's Darkness Visible , the ongoing present tenseness—or present tension—of suicide... [Antrim's intentions] are to explore the experience of his illness rather than its arc... It’s a deft and unexpected approach, diffusing narrative tension in favor of a more inchoate set of anxieties, which only expand the deeper we read. At the same time, this enables One Friday in April to move fluidly between recollection and reflection, between what happened and the questions it provokes."
Los Angeles Times - David L. Ulin
"This harrowing and beautiful account of coming close to suicide will be an instant classic. With his direct, ravishing description of his own illness, Antrim allows us to see inside the suicidal state of mind in a way no book has ever done. He repositions and redefines what suicide is and allows the reader to see and comprehend this extreme of human situations in an entirely new way."
"Donald Antrim's memoir, bringing us close to the heart of the matter and giving us a new perspective, is a clear-eyed and unsentimental study of one of the most mysterious and misunderstood human experiences. It is what one expects from great art: life-sustaining and life-confirming."
"With exceptional clarity and tremendous self-compassion, Antrim methodically recounts the moments that led up to committing himself to a psychiatric hospital for several months and the harrowing experience of getting the help he needed to bring himself back from psychosis."
Buzzfeed - Karolina Waclawiak
"A work of solace for the many people who have encountered this fear or lived with its aftermath."
"As a memoir, the book is superb, rich with all the details and vocabularies that comprise any de-mystification of illness."
Boston Globe - Patrick Nathan
★ 2021-07-28
Antrim begins this concise memoir on the evening in April 2006 when he almost plummeted from his Brooklyn fire escape. “I was there to die,” he writes, “but dying was not a plan. I was not making choices, threats, or mistakes. I was…looking back now, in acceptance. It was a relinquishing, though at the time I would not have been able to articulate that. I did not want to die, only felt that I would, or should, or must, and I had my pain and my reasons.” Immediately preceding this event was strife with his girlfriend, but his illness—what Antrim qualifies by stating, “I try not to speak about depression. I prefer to call it suicide”—started in childhood. This story, parts of which first appeared in the New Yorker , is not one of survival after the fall but of holding on. After not jumping, Antrim, then 47, checked himself into a hospital and spent four months at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Fractured into vignettes of anguished memories, lists of medications, and ruminations, the narrative is defiantly nonlinear and brilliantly reflective of the author’s state of being: anxious, inert, unworthy. Unlike a flat line, Antrim’s talent for storytelling is more similar to Russian nesting dolls: moments within moments that build upon each other as recollections and revelations. The treatment that proved most effective was electroconvulsive therapy, of which Antrim had been terrified. Interestingly, he decided to try it after receiving a call from David Foster Wallace, who’d heard about his situation from a mutual friend and phoned to say that ECT had saved his own life decades earlier. Although he returned, in 2010, for another stint in the institute, Antrim writes of his life, in between and presently, as healthy.
Slim yet formidable, a mind-bendingly good read.
