Nancy Rappaport

I hesitated to pick this book for reading. My brother committed suicide while he was in medical school. I had thought that maybe she was writing this book as attempt to understand her mother's decision and possibly help others with family suicides.

I can understand why she would want to find out everything about the mother that she lost at the age of four. The reason that I hesitated to read it was that I didn't agree with her decision to sell it as a book. I felt that it should have been kept private. I can see how her family would not feel comfortable with her decision to publish it. To me, it increase hurt instead of dealing with it.

If the author had gained some insight into why her mother took her life, and then wrote a book in an attempt to prevent the suicides of others, I would have felt better. But the way that she wrote the book, it made me feel like a voyeur into the family's pain and suffering.

This is not a book to race through, I picked up, read some and put it down. I felt strong sympathy for her mother (also named Nancy) as a child. If you read this book I am sure that you will agree with me that tremendous damage had been done to her as a child. The only thing that hooked me to finishing the book was my hope that the book would change and she would do some self examination instead of just factually reporting what happened. I have a background in psychology and counseling and the book left a very cold feeling instead of a deep understanding of why it happened.

The author goes into great detail about the messy divorce that her mother and father, including horrible custody battle. She profiles her siblings one by one and also tells of her mother and father. The happy times in their early married life, I felt were the best part of this book.

I don't think that including her patient stories are really needed in her book.

In summary, I was disappointed in the amount of insight in it. I didn't really feel her love for her brothers and sisters. When I read it,

I cannot recommend this book, especially to anyone who has had someone in their family attempt suicide.

I received this book from GoodReads but that in no way influenced the content of my review.… (mehr)

In Her Wake: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Myster of Her Mother’s Suicide by Nancy Rappaport is a fascinating and moving story of the author’s search for the truth about her mother’s suicide.

Nancy Rappaport was the youngest of her mother’s six children and she shared her mother’s name. She was only 4 years old at the time of her mother’s suicide and doesn’t remember the incident and doesn’t really remember her mother. As a child psychiatrist and having a family of her own, with children who would sometimes ask questions about her mother, she felt the need to know more. So, she set out on a journey of discovery.

Through newspaper articles, court documents, some papers she found of her mother’s, and interviewing family and friends, she set out to put together as much detail of her mother’s life as possible. She wanted to see if she could somehow understand what pushed her mother over the edge. And, she wanted to know her mother better.

I VERY highly recommend this book! It reads like a novel and is beautifully written. It will draw you in but doesn’t ever drag you down. I always felt a sense of hope and a positive feeling from the book. I found it to be a very captivating story that really hooked me and it touched me. It must have been very difficult to have been too young to remember your mother, and then to have such a cloud over her death. When she was growing up, no one talked about it, so she just really didn’t know much about what had happened or what life had been like before. I hope that her journey helped her in some ways. I enjoyed her story thoroughly and wish her and her family the best!… (mehr)

I don't read many memoirs, especially family-oriented ones: I'm prone to flash judgments and over empathizing; I can shake off fiction that rattles me but nonfiction sticks a little more. Still, this Boston-based memoir attracted me so I started it with some apprehension.

Very quickly, I saw how courageous Rappaport was as she tackled the story of her parent's marriage, her mother's suicide, and her father's subsequent parenting choices since she, her father and stepmothers, and many of her siblings still live locally. Her professional training as a psychiatrist showed through on every page: she acknowledged when her research frightened her family and offered many opportunities for her father to have his say about the story she was telling. At moments, I was impatient with her fair-minded and even-handed presentation: I wanted her to be critical or judgmental -- even mean. But in the end, she won me over (despite my muttering about her father and stepmothers) by going beyond simply recounting the days leading up to her mother's death. She explored the facets of abuse, infidelity, mental illness, addiction, and grief that impacted everyone in her family in a readable way that didn't feel too technical or dry nor too salacious or torrid. As her family has enormous connections in Boston's history, politics, and development (her grandfather was the lawyer for Vanzetti of Sacco and Vanzetti, for example) and Rappaport provides enough background to give the reader some appreciation of how publicly her parent's lived.

This is another book I've spent all week talking about to almost everyone I know. While I've never had someone close to me commit suicide, I was still able to appreciate Rappaport's looks at her family and how this painful event (and the moments before and after) impacted all of them -- and see some of my own familial pain, however dissimilar, in her story. This quiet memoir is moving but not soul-crushing, readable and genuine.… (mehr)