Description: When Aldrich's friend took his own life, they had known each other many years. With this work, Aldrich struggles with her own failure to act on her suspicions about her friend's intentions. Intimate and austere, clear eyed and tender, this innovative work creates a new form in which to experience grief, remembrance, and reconciliation.
Brief description: MARCIA ALDRICH is a professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of Girl Rearing: Memoir of a Girlhood Gone Astray and Companion to an Untold Story (Georgia), winner of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the former editor of the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction.
Review Quotes:
Exquisitely sad but painstaking in its clarity, Companion to an Untold Story is an effort to understand a friend's decision to commit suicide. The author lays out the facts and emotions using the structure of an abecedary, as if the simplicity of a child's alphabet book could bring logic to the terrible puzzle of loss. There is no suspense in the outcome, but reading the book draws you in so intimately that you, too, feel an urgent need to understand why an intelligent, likeable man would choose, with great deliberateness, to kill himself. This is a difficult subject, written extraordinarily well: a winner.
--Susan Orlean "author of Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend"