Six months had passed since my brother gassed himself, and still I could not write a word. And then, one day, that click - as Brick says in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “the click in my head that makes me feel peaceful” - and words poured from my core.

The result is The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide, my most intense and unifying work. It touches me in the way no other writing of mine does, if only because it is my truth: the truth of my brother’s life, and that of his death; what it was to be his sister and what it is to have lost him; and how in losing him, I found myself.

I still receive communications from the bereaved and from the suicidal, telling me that they have come to a new understanding of both grief and the desire for oblivion, and that this has led to the profound experience of forgiveness - both of themselves and those they lost.

If I sound too much like the Dalai Lama here, know this: my wrath can be borderless, serpentine, as far from forgiveness as hate is to art. But even so, I know what it is to love enough to forgive, and the experience is something like having a headstone lifted from your breast.

The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide is available as an audio book via this website, for a one-time subscription fee you can download every chapter of the book to itunes, your favourite podcast player, or just listen on your computer. 

Your audio book files should be downloaded to your computer within three months of purchase. The book can be listened-to at any time.

Visit TheEclipsePodcast.com to purchase this content.