He states his oppositional view in the opening aphorism: “Ask not what disease the person has, but rather, what person the disease has. The point of the story is Antrim’s opinion that our understanding of suicide is all wrong. If you try to pierce it, you’ll come up with another cloud, though in the end, Antrim gives the reader some ideas and a basket of compassion to hang onto. His suffering takes place in a subjective infinity, Hell, an eternal state of almost-death.Ī cloud of confusion and pain lies over the book. Only Antrim says his untethered and chaotic patterns of thought and action have lasted all his life. The book also recalls the “magical thinking” experienced by Joan Didion in her eponymous book, The Year of Magical Thinking. The poet Patrick Lane achieves a similar feat in his memoir, What the Stones Remember. How can a writer convey an entire life (so far) in 133 pages? Read and see. Chronologically, the story begins with his birth and ends in the present day. The first pages of the book find the author barely averting suicide while hanging from a fire escape on a chilly evening and the last pages find him sitting on a couch listening to his wife play the piano. Of the classic storylines, this is a man takes a journey, or perhaps a man climbs out of a hole. The story that holds it all together issues from an addled mind where reality is mixed with passion, memory, and illness. Antrim breaks all the rules in this just-published memoir, achieving a result that is unique and profoundly moving, fascinating, and informative.

One Friday in April by Donald Antrim