Blown Away
Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
This powerful memoir follows a father’s journey to make sense of his world after losing his son to addiction and suicide.
Fifteen years ago, Richard Boothby received a fateful call from his ex-wife that their twenty-three-year-old son, Oliver, was dead. Although Richard had been dreading this news, given Oliver’s prolonged struggle with drug dependency, nothing could have prepared him for the devastating shock. He became obsessed with uncovering the truth of why Oliver shot himself—had he been self-medicating an undiagnosed mental illness?—and what they could have done to prevent it.
In an attempt to stem the pain, Boothby turned to psychoanalysis. He was no stranger to the concept—as a professor of philosophy, he had focused his career on the intersection between psychoanalytic theory and contemporary philosophy—but this was far from an academic exercise. Through his time in talk therapy, as well as psychedelic experiences in a research study on psilocybin, he would gradually find a sense of acceptance of the unknown, and a renewed appreciation for life.
Exploring the epidemics of substance abuse and gun violence from an intimate perspective, Boothby’s poignant account of grief shows how the death of a loved one can in some ways bring us closer to them and ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A father's reckoning over his son's suicide prompts a self-indulgent path of inquiry in this bewildering work by philosophy professor Boothby (Sex on the Couch). When the author's 23-year-old son, Oliver, shot and killed himself, after years of drug addiction, he left behind a trove of unanswered questions. To quell "the burning need to know... about my part in the whole catastrophe," Boothby sought psychoanalysis and dove into his own emotional fault lines and suppressed rage. Less than a year later, desperate "to get to the bottom of my soul," he joined a psilocybin study at Johns Hopkins. Boothby brings readers on his strange trip, one that he confesses was largely inspired by his desire "to do something Oliver had done, to experience for myself the effects of some very powerful drug." Along the way, he shares multiple drug-induced revelations, such as that "the moment of death is the moment of opening," and "because love needs its failures, love needs death." While Boothby expresses disdain for the "phony feel-goodism" of self-help, his own musings have a similar cringe-inducing effect. The disjointed narrative—which jumps around a number of unspecified years—only adds to his befuddled attempts to go deep. It's a missed opportunity; there are much more substantive takes on the subject elsewhere.
