Clancy Martin

Mr. Martin is a man trying to save himself from his self. He shares how until very recently he has been chasing death but also trying to outrun it. The reader hears how he took steps to help himself throughout the years and you can feel in the urgency of the text that the writing of the book (and I think our reading it) is a large part of the outrunning he's doing. The level of honesty also speaks to urgency of his quest for a normal life (normal as in not spending time in psych show more wards/jails). Not necessarily a easy read but very much worth reading for just about anybody who's been touched by suicide, depression or addiction and that seems to be just about everybody. show less

The topic of depression and suicide is something I’m always interested in, not only as someone who has suffered from and loved many people who also suffered from the feelings Martin describes in the book, but also because grappling with these topic seems to touch on many of the central questions of being alive. Thinking about depression makes you question what it means to be happy, what exactly is a fulfilling life, and the intersection between body and mind. Suicide is the ultimate show more confrontation between man and reality - to kil yourself is not just to end your own life, in a kind of way it’s also to switch off the universe, the ultimate act of control.
Deeply aware of the depth that his topic begs for, Martin’s book sprawls in many different directions. It’s in the main part a memoir, then a kind of intellectual history of suicide, and finally a kind of self-help/how-to guide which the title wryly nod to.
Despite struggling with depression for most of my life, I can say that I’ve never been genuinely suicidal. I’ve done my best to support loved ones through ideation and actual attempts. I don’t think I would recommend this book to someone who is ok the emotional brink that Martin describes himself as being on for most of his life. This isn’t necessarily a criticism, as I don’t think it’s a reflection of the quality of the book, but so much of the book’s time is spent detailing the squalor Martin found himself in through his struggles with alcohol and depression, culminating in a number of attempts. I usually hate it when someone describes a work of art as “depressing” but this book at times, literally is - Martin is terrifyingly honest about certain heartbreaking and downright shameful chapters of his life, I almost started to understand why offing himself might feel preferable to carrying on. I could imagine this being (at the risk of using a loaded word) triggering for anyone who is already struggling with thoughts of suicide.
That being said, towards the end of the book I think there are some very neat insights in the mechanisms of the depressed brain, some from Martin himself and some quotes from others. Modern pharmaceuticals have saved many lives, but the medication solution can sometimes obscure the central hallucinations of the depressive mind. Self-imposed inertia, perfectionism, delusions/impossible aspirations to grandeur all contribute to the depressed state as any chemical imbalance. Unlike a chemical imbalance, they aren’t as neatly solved, and an essential part of Martina’s book is the long journey towards realizing maybe they can’t be fixed, and that an essential part of coming to terms with depression is making peace with the fact that we are imperfect, unperfectable beings. To deny this is to trap yourself in a spiral of deflations and disappointments. show less

A little hard to see what all the fuss is about. HOW TO SELL is droll and reasonably emblematic of our times, but hardly the dazzling tour de force and fictional indictment of contemporary consumerism that some folks are claiming it for. A while back Martin had a (presumably nonfiction) piece in the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS that was a good deal more harrowing and vivid than anything in this book.

On tortured material and the (ironic) posthumous work.

The naïve writer/reader often starts from the perspective that "it is possible to write anything," only to subsequently realize that only certain specific things can be written, and only in certain specific ways. (problems of writing.) Those of us who have at least gotten that far have done so following the recognition of a resistance in the material itself which retaliates against the kind of presentation or conclusion which we would show more have for it. When, nonetheless, we would have the material confess our conclusions, we do so by prodding (editing) in a way which produces a "tortured" work. There is something uncomfortable going on here, a kind of lack of fit. The Memoir (not just in this case) often reaches back against its authors' intentions.

To understand how a succinct 20 page essay can metastasize into a 400 page tome (which could have been even longer) we would do well to consider the idea of a "novel in retreat." A novel constructed in the form of an ego defense, where each compulsive addition to the series appears to subtract further from the argument, "Well so what if I'm not a great philosopher at least I'm a great artist and so what if I'm not a great artist at least I'm a good person and so what if I'm not a good person at least I'm trying to tell the truth and so what if I'm not telling the whole truth at least I'm making an attempt." So an essay becomes an essay/memoir becomes an essay/memoir/philosophical-investigation becomes an essay/memoir/philosophical-investigation/resource-for-crisis, but gets progressively further away from its stated goal.

On Memoir
Martin's "memoir" practices a kind of slight-of-hand. The author is endlessly apologizing for unforgiveable past transgressions, yet every questionable act is excluded from description. (Supposedly to "spare the children" the horror of repeating the experience in lexicographic form, but we know the real reason.) Occasionally we are presented with a striking image (e.g the gun in mouth), but these have the uncanny quality of still-images, as if the author is watching himself watching himself (which is, not uncoincidentally, the author's description of his meditative process).

One wonders to what extent the well-marketed book with glossy cover is functioning as a bulwark against the author's own suicidal ideation. Yet we also sense that in his continuous insistence that he is "not currently suicidal," the author is working himself up toward a future tragedy (which would lend the work the pathos it currently lacks). There is a sense that the author is out-of-place in that he continues to live. (A similar feeling arises when watching highly-acclaimed film Dear Zachary (crypto-reactionary cinematography) which, ostensibly the letter-on-film to a child, is couched in a kind of persistent vitriol such that one intuits that the child must be martyred for the sake of justifying the hatred pervading that product of cinematographic revenge.)

On Suicide
To what extent is the suicidal person subjected to intolerable feelings as a consequence of a "vegetal reflex" versus a "conclusion of objective analysis." Martin's own struggle appears to be more of the former, though he appears to be convinced it's about an even split. To what extent is the author's sympathy for himself, which is the enlightened self-actualized perspective of, "I would not have it any other way," reconciled with the notion that certain horrible and life-scarring experiences/compulsions actually make you a worse person. In the interstices between Martin's vocal rejection of suicidality, we witness the paradoxical notion that having compulsive feelings of desire for suicide makes you a deeper, more mature person, belied in the episode of the precocious undergraduate who is able to read the author's soul with a glance.

How does it come to pass that the esteemed PhD, who was once motivated by a deep sensitivity to the material, and who has pursued a strenuous course of graduate studies in confirmation of that fact, comes to lose the earnest joy of the text which once motivated him to pursue this accreditation. (Many such cases.) One must assume it has something to do with graduate-school tedium which is the major constituting power behind the monomaniacal training for dissertation-writing. Martin's scholarship lacks the levity/irony which may have once lead him to pursue a dissertation on the concept of irony in Kierkegaard. It is scholarship as flat survey, exemplifying the aseptic academic approach to the original texts which is already a kind of black dread (author does not appear to be aware of this). To forget that the texts are, even now, lying in abeyance for a new interpretation is already the death of scholarship. (Though Martin makes explicit reference to Fear and Trembling he appears to have moved beyond Kierkegaard, not bothering to consider the real possibility of an existence for which, "The ethical is the temptation.") Our author's eschatological argument is the half-serious half-Buddhist insistence that existence continues after death, but that you end up somewhere even worse. If this were an effective panacea, or even an axiom he himself believed, "It would have been enough." show less