The Life of Those Left Behind

In this heartbreaking yet hopeful autobiographical novel, an acclaimed Italian author who lost his partner to suicide testifies to the power of storytelling in living with grief.

When 30-year-old Matteo B. Bianchi published his debut novel in 1999, the timing couldn’t have been worse: he had just lost S., the man he’d lived with for 7 years, who one day, a few months after they broke up, killed himself in their apartment.

Matteo discovers the body. He feels trapped in a labyrinth of contradictory emotions and constant bewilderment, which unites all the so-called survivors of the suicide of a loved one. Yet even in his darkest hours, the writer in him starts taking notes. At first they are just fragments, shards of an existence shattered into a thousand pieces. Then they slowly transform and, memory after memory, become a profound conversation with S., caught between the temptation to let go and the desire to get back to life.

Both radical and vulnerable, intimate and universal, The Life of Those Who Remain is a devastating but luminous novel about surviving the aftermath of trauma. Bianchi produces pages of excruciating beauty, recounting his journey to redemption and rebirth, and showing how, even in the depths of the most unspeakable pain, writing—his own, and also powerful works such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous—can still save us.