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Annabel Walker

The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide

by Antonella Gambotto

Broken Ankle Books $170

Antonella Gambotto's  treatise on  loved ones who have taken their own lives could hardly be described as  reading for the festive season. The Eclipse: A Memoir Of Suicide may be honest, moving  and reflective, but at  its heart is  intense grief.

The Australian journalist and novelist has lost more than her share of lovers and friends. She also describes a period of her youth  when she swallowed handfuls of Valium  and sawed at her wrists with a blunt knife in a hopeless attempt to kill herself.

By Gambotto's own account, much of her adolescence was spent 'blotto' on drink and drugs prescribed by 'idiotic and irresponsible' doctors. She rails against the idea that anti-depressants cure depression, viewing them  as tools to infantilise adults.

Gambotto brings to The Eclipse the intense wordiness that earned her first novel, The Pure Weight Of The Heart, warm reviews. She may be a little too interested in the forecasts of  psychics and the teachings of yogis for some readers, but she also presents the hard facts,  showing that during the past 45 years suicide rates worldwide have increased by 60 per cent.

Escaping the disintegration of her family after  her grandmother's death - a loss she never got over - Gambotto moved to London, wrote for newspapers as diverse as New Musical Express and The Independent, and fell in love with Michael VerMeulen, the charismatic playboy editor of GQ magazine.  His self-destructive drinking and drug abuse eventually persuaded her to leave him, despite their engagement.

Shortly afterwards, VerMeulen died, after ingesting more than double the lethal dose of cocaine. Gambotto writes bitterly that people in the media saw his  excessive habits as par for the course in a business known for excess. She believes his abuse was a form of drawn-out suicide.

But her greatest pain and shock is reserved for when her estranged younger brother, Gianluca,  takes his  life. For readers who have had to deal with suicide, Gambotto offers a comfortingly honest account of the hellishness and black humour such events can bring. Then in her mid-30s, she  had a vituperative mother suffering from breast cancer and a father  she hadn't seen for 10 years. Her youngest brother was unable to take control, so Gambotto took on everything, from identifying Gianluca's body to arranging his funeral.

Gianluca had been unhappy for years, but - unlike many suicides - he  understood how distressing his action would be to others. Gambotto details his apologetic, no-nonsense suicide note and his neat choice of death: asphyxia. Through the waves of mourning Gambotto recounts grotesque but comic exchanges with her father. They argue about the colour of the underpants Gianluca should wear when buried (he wants red; she feels black would be more appropriate) and  when he should be buried (he wants  a quick burial; she says they should  wait two days more so that Gianluca's brain, still in the lab for testing, can  be returned).

Throughout the book, Gambotto asks: Does any man have the right to dispose of his own life? She supplies conflicting theories of philosophers and thinkers from Plato to the present. She finds that the answer is no - reflecting sadly on her beloved Gianluca that 'suicide, for him, became a kind of  sick romance'.



The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide