Photograph by David Sauveur/Agence VU

My brother died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound nearly twenty years ago. One thing that I learned fairly quickly is that if you want to bring any conversation to an abrupt and awkward halt, you can hardly do better than to mention the fact that your brother died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Every time it came up, I heard the same refrain, over and over: I’m so sorry.

The note of pity, the hushed tone of concern, the carefully sculpted facial expressions of anguish—I became so sick of these that, in response to strangers’ questions about the contours of my family or the number of my siblings, I stopped mentioning my brother at all. It was easier on everyone to airbrush him from the record, and anyway my brother was dead, so what did he care if I pretended he was never born?

Having now written a book about him and how his final act affected my life, I find that the questions still tend to elide anything to do with him. The one I hear most frequently, generally from friends, is this: Was the writing cathartic for you?

I understand the thought. My friends want to know that I’m better now, that I’ve found some kind of closure. I don’t dispute that cathartic writing has its place—generally under lock and key in a private diary. I would never deny pen and paper to a person in search of catharsis if those are the tools to get the job done, nor would I care to read the results without a substantial monetary incentive.

But the kind of writing that speaks most deeply to me requires a kind of ruthlessness and control that are antithetical to catharsis for the creator, if not the reader. To be asked if my writing is a form of catharsis annoys me, because it annexes the territory of literature under the flag of therapy. As anyone who has written a book knows, there are a thousand other, easier ways to make oneself feel better: alcohol, masturbation, adopting a dog. For “survivors of suicide,” as we’re known—a phrase that I’ve always found most peculiar, as if we’d tried it ourselves but the noose slipped, the cartridge jammed—closure is little more than a neat idea.

This is not to deny that there are private reasons, in addition to public ones, to write such a book. The private reasons involve an impulse to describe a portion of one’s experience in language that has a ring of truth, to see one’s actions given meaning and form. They involve an impulse to transfigure the horrific, the chaotic, and the merely dismal aspects of one’s experience into a compelling story with a pleasing symmetry and shapely beauty—in other words, a work of art.

The public reasons involve an impulse to make others who’ve experienced suicide at close range feel less alone by candidly recounting a journey through the miasma of anger, guilt, and despair; or to show others who have not known a similar experience a little bit of what it’s like.

Reconciling the private and the public reasons for writing this sort of book was an artistic challenge, not a therapeutic exercise. To write a truly comprehensive account of what it’s like to live in the long shadow of a family member’s suicide would be to write a book either brutally sad or brutally boring. Far from being a form of therapy, the work of making a readable story of such an experience invites the need for therapy, as you stare at a blank screen, day after day, trying to make your life come alive in language for a potential audience of strangers whose first impulse, you’ve been trained to assume, will be to recoil in horror at the first mention of self-murder.

So then, what to preserve of the experience?

The absurdities, for instance. The farcical aspects. And, as much as possible, the funny parts.

I’m not saying that there’s anything funny about my brother’s suicide. The anguish that caused him to put a gun to his temple and pull the trigger can scarcely be imagined. How could he have believed that a bullet in the brain was the answer to what troubled him? And what was the thing that troubled him? For years, I didn’t know. None of us knew: not my mother, my father, my sister, or me. Eventually, I unearthed a story that helped me to understand what the thing was, but the fact of his death was close to unbearable. I thought about it every day for years, and it made me what I suppose a doctor would call clinically depressed.

But perhaps paradoxically, finding a way to live with the unbearable can result in comedy, in retrospect if not in the moment. Making the unbearable bearable is a real-life run at improvisational burlesque, and often a massive exercise in self-deception. In my case, I became so uncomfortable with the central fact of my existence—my younger brother, alone in an Albuquerque apartment, at the age of twenty-two, choosing death over life—that I had to find ways to perpetuate the discomfort day-to-day in order to feel comfortably uncomfortable, to bring my external reality into alignment with my inner life.

I managed to work myself into the wrong situation—the wrong neighborhood, the wrong job, the wrong relationship—over and over again, in order to feel right. It was hard not to laugh at some of what I made of myself in those years—a white farm boy living in a black neighborhood, a self-described socialist at the Wall Street Journal, a shy man addicted to phone sex—and that was crucial in writing a readable book, one that didn’t take the reader by the scruff of the neck and rub her nose in endless misery.

Because let’s face it: that’s why people shrink from the topic of suicide. It bespeaks a misery beyond words. We don’t have the capacity to imagine our way into it. We don’t want to hear how the suicide of a loved one elicits suicidal thoughts in those left behind, either from despair or from a desire to achieve a perverse intimacy with the dead. But most of all we’re baffled by an act that scrambles our categories of justice. It offends our sensibilities in a way that almost nothing does anymore. A crime has been committed, but the victim and the perpetrator are one and the same. That is the essential conundrum of suicide, and a good part of what makes it so hard to discuss.

I’m about to try anyway. My book tour starts on Monday.