Martin’s parents divorced when he was 5. His father was a one-time professional boxer: violent, then violently inappropriate, New Agey, possibly a lover of Shirley MacLaine’s, likely schizophrenic, a self-identified alcoholic till his death in a state mental hospital. Clancy’s mother remarried his father’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, who had seven kids of his own but was more committed to fellow Friends of Bill. Two stepsiblings tumbled from buildings, one fatally.
Martin, too, became an alcoholic. His second wife, Rebecca — we learn little about his wives, other than that they were stabilizing forces — refused him visitation of their two daughters until he exhaled regularly into a monitoring tool called the Sobrietor, relishing the sight of a “compliant” notice like an A on a report card. “I sometimes wish there were a Sobrietor for suicide,” Martin writes. One of his central theses is that thinking about the dark act can be as addictive as booze or drugs or overspending, in a desire to be, in his case, “Mr. Fancy like the Fancy People of the World.”
He was able to resist the siren call of social media — “Facebook made me too depressed, and Instagram wasted too much of my time” — and doesn’t plumb its more disturbing corners. “How Not to Kill Yourself” otherwise roams high, low and in between, grasping at wisps of wisdom wherever they can be found, from Philip Larkin, uncredited for providing the title to two chapters, to Keanu Reeves in “Parenthood,” from Buddhists to the Stoics. But “let’s not overthink it,” Martin implores toward the end, after almost 300 very thinky pages. “Maybe we can lighten things up and just let the questions fly around.”
Insight is just as likely to come from passing strangers as established thinkers. “Sobriety is kind of like a marriage,” a septuagenarian woman with a cane tells Martin after an AA meeting, like an tag on an herbal tea bag. “Just don’t give up on it.” Trying to understand the reality of death better, Martin volunteers to help dissect a cadaver, and afterward, lying on the grass, thinks “with clarity, maybe for the first time in my life: I don’t want that. I don’t want to be dead.”
This is a rough-cut book, not a polished gem (Martin, for what it’s worth, has also offered great advice on Vice about “how to buy jewelry like a jeweler”) but I can see it becoming a rock for people who’ve been troubled by suicidal ideation, or have someone in their lives who is, and want to understand the mentality, which can seem utterly mystifying to the unafflicted.
