This manuscript. What is it? What is it? The laying out of a life along the razor’s edge of its own annihilation. An investigation of the conditions of its possibility. A reflection on famous suicides. Famous non-suicides. The illnesses within which health is inscribed. Memoir punctuated by image, number, text. Each word a brush stroke. Every metaphor a fatty lump. Constrained by the infinite sprawl of π, Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche opens as a wound into a mind working through what it means to live by passing through the identical question of what it means to die. — FAR WALL

 

 

“After losing my father to suicide I was given many very thoughtful books about why we sometimes kill ourselves; none of them, even in sum, carried the insight, vision, or credibility of Vi Khi Nao’s SUICIDE: THE AUTOIMMUNE DISORDER OF THE PSYCHE. Achingly un-sentimental, extensively researched, exquisitely illustrated, and overflowing with personal wisdom (and, most importantly, warmth), SUICIDE inhabits a truly novel numbering system to chart a kind of star map to the present condition, a guide to failure, an ode to other people; a way, if we stick together, to survive.” —D.S. CHAPMAN

 

 

“Vi Khi Nao’s SUICIDE: THE AUTOIMMUNE DISORDER OF THE PYSCHE confronts the universal question of suicide with a scientific curiosity, mathematical precision, and visionary vulnerability that is uniquely their own, and will leave a lasting impression on any reader--especially those who know all-too-well the weight of the titular subject in their lives.” — RANDALL SCOTT

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Vi Khi Nao traces all the ways suicide twisted around her family, her education, her art, and her heart condition in this brilliant memoir. It’s a revealing and honest account of her “suicidal scars of the soul” and the devastating effect that illness has on a life.—ANTHONY LUEBBERT

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Suicide would be an encyclopoedic novel if encyclopedic novels were better and if instead of trying to capture the full range of the world's knowledge--like Dante, Joyce, or Pynchon--they attempted to capture instead what knowledge feels like on the brink of death and the cosmic and pragmatic love we give to keep each other living. Vi Khi Nao knows, too, how short life is and kept it under 153 pages. —CLOSE WALL

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