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Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by Styron, William Your Price: $11.00 (New - Trade Paper)

I was twenty-three when my brother killed himself.

Skip was the oldest. I was number four of six. He always seemed so mature, so sure of himself. He was cool in a Bobby Darin sort of way, a bit of a rebel, lazy at school, bright. He was my hero.

We were seven years apart at an age when seven years seemed a huge divide, but he still let me tag along occasionally. He helped teach me to read when I was four. He was entering high school when I was entering third grade, a year ahead of other kids my age. He graduated high school while I was navigating the social shoals of sixth grade. Later, he joined the Navy.

I was finishing high school by the time he left the Navy and married someone extraordinarily bright, providing the proof I needed that cool guys could fall in love with brainy girls.

Over the years, they had a son, bought a house, struggled with troubles and then divorced. After that, everything started to go wrong. No. Everything started going wrong years before, but I'd been too young to recognize the signs.

Some time after his divorce, Skip went cross-country to visit our grandparents, where he stayed awhile before rejoining the Navy. The Navy stationed him halfway between the coasts, far from family. My parents would hear from him. He seemed happier. He was doing well. I kept hoping he'd return to California.

Early one morning in September 1975, he slit his wrists and died, two thousand miles away from family. He left letters for my mother and his son's mother that I've never read.

The snippets I learned were that he'd fallen in love. The romance fell apart. His bride-to-be left him for a good friend. In despair, he felt, at the age of twenty-nine, that he'd screwed up his life forever, was never going to be happy, and was never going to make anything of his life.

It wasn't that simple, of course. A broken romance doesn't inevitably lead to suicide.

I couldn't understand how, no matter how bad things were, he could kill himself without caring how his suicide would affect me, his other siblings, our parents, friends and acquaintances, and his four-year-old son.

I was angry with him and angry with myself for not somehow saving him.

For years I was angry, wondering why, if he thought he'd made such a mess of his life, he didn't just start over. Our newspaper had a story of a murderer who'd skedaddled out of town after killing his wife and children. He was found ten years later with a new family and a new life, selling shoes in Biloxi.

Why hadn't Skip just disappeared and moved to Biloxi?

William Styron first published Darkness Visible, which describes his battle with depression and his suicide attempt, in 1989 as an article for Vanity Fair. The next year he published an expanded version, a lean, unsettling eighty-four-page book. I read Darkness Visible for the first time ten years ago and immediately gave a copy to my mother. I've read it several times since.

Styron helped me understand what Skip had been going through and why he chose the path he chose. Styron shares his personal tale of the "insidious breakdown" that leads to suicide. Styron limns in excruciatingly painful prose the suicidal mind's despair and its belief that life is full of never-ending pain, beyond hope and will continue ever on that way.

After reading Styron's book, I realized that I couldn't, from two thousand miles away, have changed things. I stopped blaming myself, and I stopped being angry with Skip. I better understood what Skip had been feeling when he made his decision, how he felt there was no choice. Styron also helped me recognize the same dangerous, dark currents in me.v I still wish Skip's life had not taken that last turn. I wish, like Styron, he'd sought help before it was too late.

His son turned thirty-three this year. He's a terrific person. Skip would've been proud of him. He's four years older now than his father ever was.

Why do people commit suicide? Darkness Visible lays out Styron's story in unsparing detail. When I battle my own demons, Styron's book and my knowledge of the aftermath of a suicide's choices help get me through to the other side.

And there is always Biloxi.

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