Examining the relationship between creativity and suicide, Alvarez writes a biting critique of the medical model, big pharma, and those who make sense of suicide by reducing it to a person’s malfunctioning biochemical systems. Alvarez shifts from medicalization’s ‘something is wrong with you’ toward an empathetic stance that invites the reader to connect with the pain and despair that was lived by the eleven people featured who we come to know more fully. This book is a must-read for people and practitioners who want to broaden their understanding of suicide to include the very real and very painful circumstances in which some of us live … and die.

— Jolane Flanigan, associate professor, Rocky Mountain College

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Alvarez’s work straddles the razor edge of creative genius and suicide, born out of his own personal struggles and explored in the lives of eleven selected case studies from Sylvia Plath to Yukio Mishima and Theresa Duncan to Robin Williams. The tangled knot of suicide in the latter instances are not clinically undone, but probed for causes in their earlier lives, in their efforts to surmount the melancholia and emptiness, in their creative accomplishments, and finally, in their deaths and what meaning this might give to their work and their lives. Alvarez offers us no final conclusions, but with a sensitivity and deeply human openness that refuses to be content with reductionistic explanations and other subterfuges, he invites us to ponder with him the phenomenon of creativity and suicide in life and in death.

— Francis X. Charet, chair, Goddard Graduate Institute

 

 

'To study suicide up close demands vulnerability, an open mind and heart,' Alvarez writes, and the same is true for studying creativity. Alvarez brings extraordinary courage, imagination, and intelligence to his visionary exploration of the confluence of creativity and suicide. By bravely exploring the weight of trauma and loss on the creative processes and lives of eleven artists as diverse as Iris Chang and Robin Williams, Alvarez both demythologizes and contextualizes the many-layered stories and histories that infuse the lives of his subjects. Alvarez also, through four brilliant interludes, dives into the deep sea of what creativity is and needs to thrive over time and in concert with culture and the self, concluding that no single theory can encompass why creativity is a saving grace or not. What matters, Alvarez tells us, is ‘that we share our stories with empathetic others, and realize how our personal narratives are part of a larger, communal myth, bound together by our shared humanity.’ His call here is to dissolve the generalizations that diminish and seek to domesticate the wild power of the creative and those who create, especially so ‘that we express the meaning of vitality and suffering in countless ways.’ The breadth and depth of this revolutionary book speaks of our essential nature, including what it is to suffer, learn, lose, and perceive in concert with creativity. Likewise, just as poet William Stafford said, anyone with a heartbeat is in the rhythm business; this book's focus on what it means to be human makes it essential reading.

— Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, poet laureate of Kansas emerita;

author of The Sky Begins at Your Feet
 

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Suicide can feel like a closed door. It is difficult to grasp in all its complexity and offers many questions that can never be answered; thus, individuals may be defined solely by this final act. Alvarez opens this door wide to consider the vibrant souls of eleven artists whose lives ended by suicide. Instead of repeating trite medicalized explanations, Alvarez embraces these individuals’ creative genius and opens them up as people to be celebrated, people to be mourned, and people to be loved, leaving us a rich legacy undiminished by suicide. He explores the creative encounter as an act of risk in embracing the meaning of trauma, violence, war, alienation, injustice, illness, suffering, and our place in the universe. Resisting generalization through careful study, his rich and detailed biographical accounts leaves one with a new appreciation and sense of resonance with these artists, which promotes a desire to continue to explore their creative work. The Paradox of Suicide and Creativity is a profound work of phenomenological scholarship that wonderfully complicates reductive narratives of suicide and our understanding of what it means to live creatively.

— James Sparrell, core faculty, Goddard College

 

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Not one to shy away from the dark side of emotion, Alvarez has written a penetrating account of the inner lives of artists of our time for whom suicide became a compelling alternative to living in constant psychological pain. This landmark book explores how the mind (and culture for that matter) endeavors to keep fear and dread at arm’s length and sometimes fails. Alvarez offers a fresh perspective on the foundations of creativity as one of the mind’s survival tools that paradoxically and tragically can lead to the destruction it was intended to avoid.

— Dan Ogilvie, professor emeritus, Rutgers University;

author of Fantasies of Flight