I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye
A Memoir of Loss, Grief, and Love
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In this deeply emotional memoir, a longtime ESPN writer reflects on the suicide of his son Max and delves into how their complicated relationship led him to see grief as love.
In February 2015, Ivan Maisel received a call that would alter his life forever: his son Max's car had been found abandoned in a parking next to Lake Ontario. Two months later, Max's body would be found in the lake.
There’d been no note or obvious indication that Max wanted to harm himself; he’d signed up for a year-long subscription to a dating service; he’d spent the day he disappeared doing photography work for school. And this uncertainty became part of his father’s grief. I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye explores with grace, depth, and refinement the tragically transformative reality of losing a child. But it also tells the deeply human and deeply empathetic story of a father’s relationship with his son, of its complications, and of Max and Ivan’s struggle—as is the case for so many parents and their children—to connect.
I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye is a stunning, poignant exploration of the father and son relationship, of how our tendency to overlook men’s mental health can have devastating consequences, and how ultimately letting those who grieve do so openly and freely can lead to greater healing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maisel (The Maisel Report), a former senior writer for ESPN, reflects on the tragedy of losing his 21-year-old son, Max, to suicide in this beautiful and heart-wrenching work. One morning in 2015, Maisel received a call from a sheriff's office in Upstate New York, near his son's college, reporting that Max's car had been found near the shore of Lake Ontario, with no sign of its owner. Maisel's worst fears were realized when it became clear that Max had deliberately walked out on the lake's frozen surface until the ice broke beneath him. While Maisel knew that Max had had his share of struggles—especially with connecting with other people—neither he nor his wife, Meg, were aware of the extent of their son's pain. Flashbacks to Max's childhood make him a vivid personality, and photos of him throughout render the author's grief devastatingly visceral. Even in the face of despair, the Maisels had no choice but to go on living without Max. Rather than succumbing to the "sugary, greeting-card emotion" that makes stories of grief, like his, palatable, Maisel writes honestly about learning how to have an "appreciation for what comes, with the understanding that I am guaranteed nothing." The result yields a deeply affecting testament to the fragility of life, and the human capacity for resilience.
