The weather in Sussex, London is brisk; the sun shining. The large stones are smooth in her hands. Solid and heavy in her pockets. They bulge from her coat. Though she found herself in this exact position, standing by the river, ready to end her life days ago, she failed. She returned home drenched, body shivering from the cold. But today she knows more. Today she has the rocks.

Virginia Woolf spent most of her life in one of two states: writing or fighting a bipolar/manic depressiveness which went undiagnosed until after she’d drowned herself on March 28^th, 1941. Three weeks later her body was discovered by a group of children playing near the water.

Each of the 20 legendary luminaries unearthed in Alix Strauss’ Death Becomes Them was brilliant, creative and of course, suicidal. Manic, bipolar, depressed and suffering from addiction, these geniuses were also self-destructive.

Death Becomes Them is an eye-opening and intimate portrait of the lonely, sad and nightmarish lives these famous folks led. Along with being an historic overview of suicide, Strauss’ book delves into the deaths of our most influential cultural icons: Sylvia Plath, Adolf Hitler, Diane Arbus, Sigmund Freud, Vincent van Gogh, Abbie Hoffman, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Cobain, Spalding Gray, and Anne Sexton, among others. The deaths are as diverse as the person that killed themselves. Some are tragic – Dorothy Dandridge was found naked on her bathroom floor, a handful of anti-depressants swimming in her system. Others are bizarre – Hunter S. Thompson shot himself while on the phone with his wife in an eerie, copycat tribute to his hero, Ernest Hemingway who killed himself in a similar way forty-four years earlier.

While Strauss explores some of the most talked about and monumental suicides of the past she examines our own morbid fascination, asking why we have become so fixated on these tortured souls. While paying tribute to their lives, focus is placed on their final days and the incidents that led up to the moment when they took their last breath.

Strauss decodes their suicide notes, touches on their accomplishments and delves into the methodology of their deaths by documented autopsy and police reports, death certificates, obituaries, and personal photos. Lists regarding controversial, bizarre, famous and poorly executed suicides along with unusual facts and statistics are found in this mammoth tome.

It takes about 90 seconds to pass out and 4 minutes to die if you put a plastic bag over your head. Even more unsettling, the bag doesn’t need to be tied at the bottom for the lungs to be deprived of oxygen.
Called a suicide magnet, the Golden Gate Bridge is the most popular location in the world to jump from.
Actor David Strickland, who hung himself in a cheap hotel room in Vegas, falls into the category of the group most apt to leave suicide notes. The most common knot used is the slipknot, which is usually placed at the side of the neck.
Musician Elliott Smith – who stabbed himself in the chest – chose one of the rarest methods.
The leading method of killing yourself, a gun, is easy, fast, painless, efficient and accounts for approx 52% of all suicides. ‘Pulling a Hemingway’ or the ‘Hemingway Solution’ refers to someone who killed themselves placing a shotgun to the head.

Written in a creative, descriptive and informative tone, Death Becomes Them is a private, provocative and personal tribute to these lost souls—a fond remembrance and a final goodbye.

Early praise for Death Becomes Them:

“Every life is laid out with such humor, such style and heart, it’s hard to imagine the dead themselves would not be thrilled to come back and read what the author had to say about them. Forget the bible - this is what I want to find in a hotel drawer at four in the morning. A truly unique, compelling and strangely life-affirming work of literary investigation. The perfect book to get you through the night.” — Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight

“Strauss brilliantly exposes the devilry in the details and makes the profoundly moving, self-inflicted end-days of the greats. A fascinating read.” — Michael Largo, author of Genius and Heroin

Death Becomes Them

Inside the suicides of life’s great romantics

by Larry Getlen

The first time Virginia Woolf attempted suicide, she tried to jump out a window but failed — since it was on the first floor. Ernest Hemingway bought the gun for his own self-inflicted death from Abercrombie & Fitch. And after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, his wife, Courtney Love, found a piece of his skull on the floor and washed it, then later clipped off a swatch of his pubic hair as a memento.

“Death Becomes Them,” journalist Strauss’ well-researched collection of famous suicides and pertinent facts about ending one’s own life, has no big statement to make about the act of suicide, but, rather, many fascinating little ones. Think of this book as “Trivial Pursuit: Suicide Edition.”

Ernest Hemingway, with wife Pauline Pfeiffer in 1934,
showed suicidal tendencies early on.

The majority of her tales consist of stories of famous suicides, divided into the categories “Authors,” “Actors,” “Musicians,” “Artists,” and “Powerful People.” Throughout these tales, similarities emerge both in and out of the divisions.

Suicidal types, for one, give many signs of their intentions, often years in advance. Hemingway, for instance, used to “joke” with friends about how he was going to do it, including actually putting one of his guns in his mouth, and explaining to them that “the palate is the softest part of the head.”

Friends of legendary photographer Diane Arbus, meanwhile, noticed that she was “tying things up” in the time before she killed herself, including asking them if they wanted letters they’d written to her returned. And performance artist Spalding Gray would leave voice messages for family members telling them that he’d jumped off the Staten Island Ferry long before he actually did so.

Strauss also breaks down similarities in how people in different areas of creative endeavor did the final deed. Several notable musicians and writers, such as Elliott Smith and Hunter S. Thompson, killed themselves with others in the home, while actors were more likely to take their lives in solitude. Artists, meanwhile, die by the blade far more than others, since the result of cutting oneself is “messy, bloody, and visually shocking.”

There are also several illustrations of how suicide, despite its tragic nature, does not always conjure the sympathy one might think. As Arbus’ boyfriend waited for the police after the creative visionary cut her wrists, her neighbors argued over who would get her West Village apartment. And after Sylvia Plath killed herself by inhaling gas, her husband’s new wife sent one of Plath’s friends the gas bill, with a note simply stating, “She was your friend. You pay the bill.”

While Strauss shows how suicide is often the product of a lifelong battle with depression, there is the occasional suicide that is simply inexplicable. Over the final 20 years of his life, Adolf Hitler had four different women attempt to kill themselves out of love for him.

Three succeeded.

The Mysteries Behind Society’s Most Famous Suicides

by David Kaufman

Sept 15, 2009

Half history lesson, half celebrity exposé, author Alix Strauss’s new book, Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious, is a pop-culture take on one of society’s most painful topics. Focusing on 20 famous figures who took their own lives, Death Becomes Them provides the backstories behind the tragic and manic last days of icons ranging from Kurt Cobain to Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf. Equally sad and shocking, Strauss’s profiles help fans and cult followers better understand how these brilliant, tortured souls crossed the line from depression to self-destruction. TIME talked to Strauss about what it was like to report on death and the surprises she uncovered.

Why do you think there is such a morbid fascination with certain suicides, sometimes even centuries after they took place?

Because suicides are like riddles with the answers left out. So people are constantly struggling to find that “aha” moment — the event or encounter that pushed someone over the edge from sadness to suicide. There is this need to know what made them do it — and, perhaps, how it could have been prevented.

And Death Becomes Them is about filling in these gaps?

Exactly. Each of these characters left not only unanswered questions but unrealized talent and unknown potential as well. We’ll never know what else van Gogh might have painted. Or how another Diane Arbus portrait might have turned out. Or how a later Hemingway novel might have read.

Each story reads like its own mini–mystery novel. They’re incredibly fact-filled.

We didn’t just look at the events leading up to the suicides but at the actual pathologies of how each figure chose to end their life. So the devil here is truly in the details. Who knew that Anne Sexton had several glasses of vodka and put on her mother’s fur before gassing herself? Or that Abbie Hoffman was watching his favorite film, The Godfather, as he swallowed a fatal dose of whiskey and barbiturates? Or that when the police departed — and she was finally left alone with her dead husband’s corpse — Courtney Love dipped her hands in Kurt Cobain’s blood before eerily washing a piece of his blown-out skull?

Many of your subjects were also investigated as murder cases.

There are a lot of conspiracy theorists who insist some of these people were actually killed, and we address those questions. Some say musician Elliott Smith could not possibly have stabbed himself through the chest without help. And everyone from authors to filmmakers have long believed that Courtney Love was involved in Kurt Cobain’s death. Ultimately, we left it to the professionals. If the police report ruled it a suicide, we ruled it a suicide.

How was it researching and writing the book? Did all that death impact your life?

It felt like I was in this swirl of morbidity for six months. But the work was as fascinating as it was depressing. All of that depression, and the waste of life, made me want to make the most of my own.

Were any of these stories almost too painful to report?

As a Jew, [I found that] Hitler was very difficult to write about. Every other story here is a tribute and a celebration of someone’s life, so we struggled with whether it was appropriate to include him. Ultimately we agreed Hitler could not be overlooked.

Each story is obviously very different, but were you able to identify any unexpected patterns?

There were actually quite a few. None of the women, for instance, shot themselves, though many of the men did. Poisoning was favored by people in positions of power, such as Hitler. Most of the actors chose to be cremated. And there was also the unusual discovery that authors who write in the first person are far more at risk for suicide.

Many of your subjects had drug problems.

Not just drug problems but full-blown addictions. Kurt Cobain was a daily heroin user. Michael Hutchence’s body was found surrounded by narcotics. Anne Sexton was a serious alcoholic. These were not people able to make the best decisions for themselves.

There is renewed interest right now in English mathematician Alan Turing, a World War II hero who killed himself in 1954 rather than face criminal charges for homosexuality. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently issued an apology for the “appalling treatment” Turing received.

Turing was clearly someone who was way ahead of his time and deeply misunderstood by the society in which he lived. His honesty about his life and loves would be taken for granted today, but more than 50 years ago it led directly to his death. Suicide is still a very serious problem for gays and lesbians, and Brown’s apology could certainly help people struggling today.

There is a lot of technical information in the book. Are you at all worried that it could be used as a how-to guide?

There is always that concern with any book that is dark and deep as well as informative. I want people to be engaged with the book — but certainly not that engaged.

Drink Like a Dead Art Star: Cocktails Inspired by Diane Arbus and Mark Rothko

by Peter Joseph

Cct 1st, 2009

Not all books come with a body bag, but that was the favor given out at the book party for Alix Strauss’ marvelously morbid Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious. The bags held macabre gifts like Funeral Home Perfume and Waterproof Mascara, which aren’t exactly to my taste, but they also included Vincent Van Gogh vodka and Hemingway Daiquiri rum, which definitely are. The liquor didn’t stop flowing there: Strauss asked mixologist Eben Klemm to invent signature cocktails for a few of the book’s exquisite corpses, making it the best literary celebration of death since Finnegans Wake.

Start with the Diane Arbus cocktail: Michael Collins whiskey mixed with Squash and Balsamic. (Somewhere Michael Collins is wondering why his whiskey is being served in honor of another one of the deceased.) Whiskey, squash, and balsamic may sound like a strange mixture but I can assure you it’s no stranger than the people who posed for her.

As Alix Strauss puts it: “Midgets, circus freaks, nudists, retarded children, giants, twins, and transvestites. Human oddities. These were the subjects and the passions behind the controversial black-and-white photographs that made Diane Arbus famous.” Remember, Arbus is the only person to have a fictional biopic made about her romancing a man with werewolf syndrome. And no matter how you usually take your balsamic, the cocktail certainly goes down smoother than this:

For something more soothing, switch to the Mark Rothko cocktail: Tommy Bahama Gold Rum, Averna and beet juice – “for the bloodshed,” as the menu puts it, referring to his elaborate death by slitting his arms (wrists were too conventional, perhaps). I’ve never been a big fan of Rothko’s paintings, but I wouldn’t mind contemplating a roomful of them with a glassful of this in hand. There’s always room for a new perspective. Consider, for instance, that on the day of Rothko’s suicide his doctor had given him a clean bill of health. But the doctor was drastically mistaken – the artist had only a year to live. If he’d been told about this death sentence, would Rothko have decided to wait and let nature take its course?

We could ask a similar question to any of the celebrities in Death Becomes Them. What’s the hurry? There are books to be read, blogs to be written, and drinks to be drunk. Not all cocktails are named for someone who has died. “Colonel” Joe Rickey drank his name into history. John Collins enjoyed more than a few of his namesake libation (though he probably didn’t call it that). Why not stick around to witness your honorary drink’s creation? That’s my plan. If only to be sure that there will be neither squash nor balsamic in it.

Alix Strauss: Living with the Dead

by Ron Hogan

Sept 16th, 2009

Cobain Room @ Release Party

Monday night, the West Village’s 675 Bar was packed with people ready to celebrate the publication of Alix Strauss’s Death Becomes Them, a consideration of several celebrity suicides that works at the underlying motivations behind the act. The basement bar’s nooks were redecorated to pay tribute to many of the book’s subjects—here, Strauss puts the finishing touches on the Kurt Cobain room—and signature drinks like the Virginia Woolf (vodka and Alize Bleu, with a Swedish fish dropped in) and the Dorothy Dandridge (whiskey, mint, and cassis) flowed freely. A few weeks earlier, we’d met up with Strauss, and we asked if this book’s origins stemmed from a similar impulse to those of her first book, the novel-in-stories The Joy of Funerals. “It’s about the way that we come together, our need for connection, our need to understand after death,” she agreed. “When there’s a suicide, there are all these unanswered questions; I think we’re desperate to be our own detectives and to understand more. So it felt like a natural progression to me.”

Was it a depressing topic to live with for nine months, even with four research assistants doing a lot of the grunt work? “A lot of people said I should definitely go out and have fun after five or six or twelve hours of suicide readings,” Strauss recalled. “I actually connected with these people in a very weird way, though. Yes, it was depressing, yes, it was upsetting, but I felt so connected to them, because I was doing so much deep research, that it didn’t affect me in a sad way as much as it was very intensified. The need to go out was more about having a chance to unwind as opposed to saying this subject was so depressing I was going to slit my own throat. Which would probably help book sales,” she chuckled softly.

The night of the party, however, the mood was nothing but upbeat. We slipped out about halfway through, but not before Strauss rallied the crowd into a celebrity suicide trivia contest—as another partygoer recounted one of the highlights, when Strauss asked how one person’s body was found, somebody in the room shouted back, “Dead!”

Exclusive: Q&A with Death Becomes Them Author Alix Strauss

by Elizabeth Williamson

Sept 15th, 2009

With the announcement just last night of Patrick Swayze’s passing, we can only hope that this unofficial Summer of Death comes to a close with the cooling weather. As much collective mourning as any celebrity death can inspire, whether it’s somewhat expected (like Swayze’s) or not (like Michael Jackson’s), there’s something shocking — and haunting — about a high-profile suicide that leaves fans reeling even more. In her new book Death Becomes Them, Alix Strauss looks at the methods and the madness behind some of the most shocking celebrity suicides in recent memory, from Kurt Cobain to Elliott Smith, and some from not-so-recent history (think Vincent van Gogh and Hitler).

Flavorpill: This has been the summer of celebrity death — an actress, musicians, a powerful man; there has been a high-profile passing from almost every category highlighted in your book. And the press and public outcry these deaths have received has been enormous. You look back at past suicides from Hollywood’s Golden Age to writers of the Lost Generation in the book. Did those cases get the same kind of press in their time?

Alix Strauss: It’s a different kind of press. I don’t think the media craze had happened as much as it has happened now, with this instant gratification we feel as we read something on the web and it’s all happening at that moment. That didn’t happen with Sylvia [Plath] and Ernest [Hemingway], and certainly not Socrates — I mean, you had to call everyone together to watch the poor man commit suicide.

I think if these people were around today, you’d have that kind of mass hysteria and mass mourning that we all do together because we want to feel part of something, and grieve, and have our questions answered somehow. But that stuff wasn’t available back then. If it was, we would have been in the same sort of frenzy, but it shows that that curiosity is human nature, because we’re still interested. There are biographies upon biographies about Sylvia and Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud. These are people we will forever be enchanted with and forever want to know more about. We can’t get enough of them. I think it’s probably the same; we just didn’t have the availability to have this instant access.

FP: What is it about suicide as an act that separates it from other star’s deaths in the public mind?

AS: I think it’s because we’re given so little to go on. I don’t think we’re always aware of how depressed someone is, or how bad it is. With someone like Farrah Fawcett, we took that journey with her for two years — from when she found out that she had cancer, when she fought it, and everything. There is something very secretive about a suicide… and it’s unexpected. So the first thing, aside from shock, is that we want to understand. Especially when these people have everything going for them. There’s nothing sadder than Spalding Gray going out in the bitter cold in the middle of the night and jumping off of a ferry all by himself. There’s something that piques our interest because we don’t fully understand, and the details matter because we want to connect so badly. Like, knowing that Anne Sexton took off all of her jewelry, had a few drinks, and put on her mother’s fur before she got into the car — it’s sad, but those details help paint the bigger picture for us — and then we connect with her somehow. Clearly she had these issues with her mother, and who doesn’t?

Also, it’s a piece of history that we’re not going to get — we’re never going to get that next chapter or next story Hunter S. Thompson would’ve written. We’ll never get the next song from Kurt Cobain — I would’ve loved to see what his next album would’ve been like. We won’t get that. So, we’ve also been jipped somehow.

FP: There’s always that thought that some musicians or an artists could only achieve greatness posthumously. After all your research, did you come across anyone that you thought may have killed themselves to achieve fame, or further their art?

AS: I can’t channel the dead, although of course I’ve tried in doing this book, but I don’t think fame was that important to that many of them. The only one was maybe Peg Entwistle. She was this actress that just couldn’t get to where she wanted to be fame-wise. She might have. Maybe the actors a little more. Van Gogh really was struggling — he’s another. He really felt he didn’t achieve the fame he was do, but I don’t think he thought killing himself would bring him fame; it would just end his misery. It was really much darker and deeper. They were all just drowning in an enormous amount of misery and addiction.

FP: Your first novel, The Joy of Funerals, clearly shared a topic with this book. What has lead you to write about mourning and funerals, and what specifically lead you to this book?

AS: Joy of Funerals was really about a grieving period in the heads of these fictional characters. They’re all a little wacky and weird. Everyone links to each other in the end and the point was to show that we all grieve differently but we’re all the same, and want to connect.

There was still this idea of mass mourning and a need to connect and need to feel part of something in this book. This is sort of our Kennedy moment. For many of us, we’re going to remember where we were when we heard that Kurt Cobain just shot himself and was dead. I really wanted to get into the stories and find out what went on and what their last days were like, and focus on those last days. It was really difficult to compartmentalize someone’s brilliant life in 2,500 words…

FP: I was going to ask about that. Most of the people here have had full-length biographies written about them. Did you worry about trivializing them at all, by focusing on their final act?

AS: It was a concern. Because there were bios, documentaries, articles, etc., and the amount of information I amassed was overwhelming. The big goal was just to stay on track with what their methodology was, what their pathology was, what their last days were like, and what details we could find from that last week. We talk about career highlights, but the goal was really to stay focused, because many people don’t know about the last days. They don’t know those little details. They don’t know that Courtney Love got into the coffin and snipped some of Kurt’s pubic hair off before he was buried. I mean, those are the details that are interesting and bizarre and we just want to know more about. People do want the details and then maybe, hopefully, they’ll find these people interesting enough to go out and go deeper.

FP: Did writing this book, and looking at suicide for so long, affect you personally?

AS: I never felt suicidal myself, but I did feel for them. You can’t help and feel lonely and desperate for someone like Spalding Gray. I wish I could go back in time and pull Anne Sexton from the car. She was hospitalized 22 times — there’s something fascinating about that, astonishing and fascinating. She was just brilliant. She had pills she called her “kill me pills” and that’s fascinating. These details tell us so much.

FP: Anyone you wanted to include but didn’t, or really didn’t “feel for,” but still included?

AS: I struggled with Hitler. Being Jewish, and having to include him in the book of people we are paying tribute to, that was very hard to write. We ended up deciding that he did change history — as disgusting and horrible and horrific a person as he was. And his contribution can’t even be considered a contribution, but who he was and what he represented and his impact on history was so vital and important that we had to put him in it. But yet, he was a fascinating mad man — totally fucked up, a horrific human being, but important to history.

FP: Looking at all of these cases, even the ones you included in the “Mysteries” section of the book, did you come to any conclusions for yourself ? Are you convinced any unsolved cases or murders were actually suicides, or vice versa?

AS: I was shocked at some of the mishaps in terms of forensics, autopsies, police reporting — so many mistakes. Mark Rothko’s and Elliott Smith’s names were misspelled on police reports. And there were no hesitation marks on Elliott Smith’s chest when he stabbed himself. He didn’t pull his clothing away, as the norm would be if you were going to stab yourself. The Post-It his girlfriend found seemed like an afterthought. I didn’t read anything that said that they had the handwriting analyzed, as they did with Kurt Cobain. Look at DJ AM, which could be a clear accidental overdose, but you never really know. I think sometimes we’re very quick, because we’re such a celebrity-culture, whoreish nation. We’re very quick to make these assumptions.

FP: Were there any trends you saw emerge when you looked at your research at the end of the day? Any commonalities?

AS: The writers were the most cerebral in some sense. The artists all were self-mutilating and blood was a very big aspect for all three of them. [Mark] Rothko slit his arms, Diane Arbus slit her wrist, and Van Gogh cut off his ear, and a few months later shot himself. All of the artists were very visual killings, which I guess is not surprising. The musicians were the murkiest. I don’t know if we’ll ever know the full story about Kurt Cobain or Elliott Smith.

Flaunt

Death Becomes Them

by Jessie Schiewe

July 15th, 2009

While it’s not your average summer read, Death Becomes Them, Alix Strauss’ anthology on famous suicides, is a gripping novel indeed. Despite the somewhat cliché title, Strauss’ focus is both serious and in-depth. Aside from presenting readers with information on the most popular suicide methods (gunshot (57%) for males and poisoning (38%) for women), the book is replete with copies of suicide notes, diary entries, death certificates, and newspaper articles.

However, what is most appealing about the book is not the subject matter per se, but the motives behind it. While most people may assume that readers will be attracted to this book for its gory and gruesome details, it is clear that these were not Strauss’ intentions when writing the book. Covering such famous deaths as Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Kurt Cobain, Adolph Hitler, and Vincent van Gogh, her focus is not so much on how these celebrities killed themselves but on why. For each suicide, Strauss provides the expected factual information, but where she deviates is when she provides insight into their mental state. The book gives detailed information concerning their actions the day of their death, possible motives for their death, and evidence of their intent to commit suicide as shown through their works and actions.

While this novel is an anthology, it reads more like a detective novel with Strauss serving as the lead detective in a murder case. The novel is divided up into sections that group each suicide by their profession. The sections are divided into: authors, actors, musicians, artists, and powerful people.

One might assume that the further one reads of this book, the more bored one gets. However, this is not the case. Rather than encountering boredom, one encounters depression. And not depression for the obvious reason: that of feeling sorry for those who died. One feels depressed because the more one reads, the more one begins to relate to each suicide. Strauss has masterfully constructed her novel in such a humane way as to make the suicides of these once famous and unattainable people accessible to the public.

Although the book will not shock you with gory, stomach-churning details, your stomach will turn, as you soon will realize that underneath it all—underneath all the fame, glory, money, beauty, and brilliance—we are all the same and thus, all have the potential to end up dying in the same way.

Death Becomes Them Review

by Jennifer Somerset

Sept 13th, 2009

Death is one of the great unknowns and because of this it holds this mixture of fear, curiosity, fascination and dread in each of us. To the more tortured souls among us, the thought of continuing and day to day existence is much worse than the mystery of death. The law of averages also seems to dictate that the more creative and in touch you are, the harder life itself is. When the realization that love and happiness does not necessary go hand in hand with fame and fortune, that anchor that some famous held onto on their climb up vanishes, leaving them lost and adrift. Mix that with the loss of strength in the vices for numbing the pain, and the light of a shining star gets extinguished much too soon in our eyes.

Alix Strauss has focused on twenty such instances, covering genera’s such a writing, acting, music, as well as those known for their powerful presence in society in general. As Strauss points out, “As a culture, we are obsessed with death. As a population, we connect with one another by sharing the same experiences…we are also addicted to the drama. We crave their stories the same way they craved their pills, liquor, coke and heroin. We want to understand the sadness they felt and the depression they couldn’t live with.”

Through meticulous research, Strauss provides us with the details of the last few days of such individuals that span numerous eras such as Ernest Hemmingway, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Dandridge, David Strickland, Kurt Cobain, Mark Rothko, Adolf Hitler and Abby Hoffman to name a few. The half truths that have been whispered around each of them are addressed and clarified. With some, unknown details are given that further help us understand the mindset of the individual and maybe understand a little better the why of the situation. The final section is devoted to what I think of as cocktail facts about the subject and a few “post mortem” about some of the individuals touched upon earlier.

Strauss handles such a delicate subject matter with a mixture of evenhanded mater of factness and compassion. The romantic notion that sometimes accompanies the thought of suicide has been removed and in its place are the statistical facts of the subject. With some of the people highlighted, we also learn that if they had been able to get past that last bleak day, the sun of good fortune would have indeed shined upon them once again.

Inscribed with a poison pen

by Mark S. Porter

Sept 28th, 2009

We revel in reading gossip, the oft-florid accounts of the affluent and the accomplished abed in adultery or abruptly being introduced to their personal doom.

Our collective fascination with the famous and flashy is immeasurably intensified when the objects of our adulation self-impose their demise.

On our level of superficial adoration, we are incredulous that someone who’s achieved fame and fortune, fan-worship and wealth could commit suicide.

We perceive stars as sitting on top of the world, and cannot fathom when they jump off.

Alix Strauss figuratively jumps after them.

"Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous & the Notorious," is Strauss’ meticulous melding of crime-scene investigations, psychological examinations, detailed chronologies leading up to notables’ deaths, and myriad epiphanies on the means of accomplishing suicide.

She details the declines of dozens of actors, musicians, artists, poets, and writers, and "powerful people" who range from Sigmund Freud to Abbie Hoffman.

A Manhattan resident, Strauss will be crossing the Hudson River this Saturday, Sept. 26, to read from "Death Becomes Them" and conduct a book-signing in Watchung Booksellers — and perhaps discussing the notables who have fatally jumped into the Hudson and other rivers.

Usually there’s a quiz," Strauss jokingly said about her readings. "I like to give prizes."

She’s visiting Montclair in September, which coincidentally is National Suicide Prevention Month.

"Death Becomes Them" teems with fascinating, if macabre, tidbits about the methodology, motivations and even the madness inherent in offing oneself.

Every death "is paired with fascinating facts," Strauss told The Times. "What carbon monoxide does to the body, how many people have jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge, and what happens when the body hits the water."

Each chapter focuses on a different group — for example, artists or authors — and digs deeply into the reasons why and actions of about two dozen people in that group. Each chapter concludes with summaries of others who also ended their lives.

While we know the "who" and "when" in nearly every suicide she profiles, Strauss provides an array of "what," "where" and, most fixating, the "why."

Fans of the writer Ernest Hemingway know that, despite writing fiction that earned him the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, he killed himself. Strauss details Hemingway’s psychological and physical decline, providing vignettes of his personality and his deterioration that concluded with the author, in his Idaho house, pressing a double-barreled Boss shotgun into his mouth and pulling one trigger.

After summing up his sons’ discovery that Ernest had disinherited them, Strauss provides readers with an "Unearthed" subchapter:

"The leading method of killing yourself, a gunshot is easy, fast, painless, efficient, and accounts for approximately 52 percent of all suicides. ‘Pulling a Hemingway’ and the ‘Hemingway solution’ refer to killing yourself by placing a shotgun to the head. People often put shotguns or rifles in their mouths, since it’s a stabilized position and provides a direct route to the brainstem. Since most people are right-handed, guns are also usually aimed at the right temple."

The writer of lifestyle articles for newspapers and magazines, Strauss is the author of "The Joy of Funerals," a collection of short stories, and she compiled "Have I Got a Guy for You," an anthology of "mother-coordinated blind date horror stories."

Strauss described "Death Becomes Them" as a "follow-up to my novel, ‘The Joy of Funerals" … I’ve always been interested in human behavior and how we grieve."

She wrote "Death Becomes Them" in about eight months of "14-hour days of research. It was just an enormous amount of autopsy reports and pathologists and police, one ‘-ologist’ after another."

The book may have a transcendent lifespan. "We are in discussions with both television and film," Strauss said. "They are ready to talk about a subject that’s been a little taboo."

As she introduces each suicide, Strauss provides a mini-biography, including details of the funeral and the "final resting place."

"It’s a front-row seat to an intimate picture of a person’s life," she said.

Of course, it’s the person’s sudden and self-imposed decision to conclude life that places them in her pages.

"These are people who made huge contributions to society," said Strauss, adding, "The devil is in the details."

We’re Reading: Death Becomes Them

Sept 15th, 2009

We headed downtown last night to mix and mingle at a party for the new book Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous and the Notorious by pop culture journalist (and Transracial bud) Alix Strauss.

The book explores and explains the back-stories behind 20 famous folks who ended their lives via their own hands. Iconic characters such s Kurt Cobain, Anne Sexton, Vincent van Gogh, Abbie Hoffman and others.

Each chapter looks at the how and the why such brilliant minds could no longer contend with society — and is packed with endless, unusual details about their final days, and how their deaths were met by the culture at large.

Some of the people covered — Diane Arbus, Sylvia Plath, Adolph Hitler, Michael Hutchence — are already well-known for both their lives, and how they chose to end them.

Others — including actor Peg Entwistle and singers Ian=2 0Curtis (of Joy Division) and Elliott Smith — are less famous, but their stories and losses are equally gripping and tragic.

Interestingly, Strauss was quite prescient in including a chapter on Alan Turing, the Gay British mathematician and World War II hero who killed himself in 1954 following years of state-led persecution over his homosexuality — which even included chemical castration!

In August, an on-line petition was launched to demand an official apology to Turing — and earlier this month, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown delivered a Downing Street-backed “I’m sorry” to Turing on behalf of the United Kingdom.

In [a] nifty piece from today on Time.com, Strauss talks about Turing’s legacy and his enduring importance in both her book and the larger culture:

Turing was clearly someone who was way ahead of his time and deeply misunderstood by the society in which he lived, Strauss says. His honesty about his life and loves would be taken for granted today, but more than 50 years ago it led directly to his death. Suicide is still a very serious problem for gays and lesbians, and Brown’s apology could certainly help people struggling today.

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