Against a background of suburban Philadelphia in the 1950s, and the family secret of his father's alcoholism, Henry comes of age as the youngest of four children. He rejects his father's course in managing the family chocolate factory, and goes on to college, becoming a writer and teacher. When Henry marries, and becomes a father himself, he is impacted by the social revolutions of the 1970s, and struggles to avoid his father's flaws. He leads a literary life in Boston, founds the literary magazine Ploughshares, and befriends novelist Richard Yates. During the 1980s, Henry suffers the deaths of his parents, infertility, rejections of his work, and setbacks in his teaching career. In the 1990s, while his daughter and adopted son are swept up into trials of adolescence and young adulthood, and as his wife grieves the deaths of friends and family, Henry confronts a spiritual abyss similar to his father's, and learns to surrender to life, to love, to aging and mortality.
By turns lyrical, quirky, confessional, and experimental in form, Henry's essays build into an affirming and generous vision. While addiction, the uses of imagination, a passion for literature, and issues of heart and soul are key motifs, a bungee jump becomes Henry's central metaphor: "isn't this life? isn't this art? We live and trust in our safe suicides."
About the Author :
Ploughshares, which DeWitt Henry directed for its first twenty years, and for which he received a Massachusetts Commonwealth Award in 1992, is regarded as one of the leading literary magazines in the country. Henry's novel, The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts, won the inaugural Peter Taylor Prize. Jack Smith wrote: "The novel evokes in the reader a sense for the power of the heart and will to transform one's self--and to make claims on what's rightfully one's own." The same can be said for Safe Suicide (Red Hen Press, 2008). Henry is a professor at Emerson College in Boston. He has also edited five anthologies, including Sorrows Company: Writers on Loss and Grief and (with James Alan McPherson) Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men. He is working on a childhood memoir and novel.
Review :
In Safe Suicide, an assemblage of revealing, interrelated essays, DeWitt Henry...offers up to us his world, honest and intimate. Henry's writing is confessional, yes, but these episodes don't feel designed to shock. More so, they're an acknowledgement of the strange, strained intimacies we share....Throughout, Henry is able to imbue weight and significance to the daily trials....And throughout, he demonstrates a reverence and a respect for his family, his fellow writers, his students, and the onward thumping push of life.
--Nina McLaughlin, The Phoenix
As with any flat-out wonderful book, a few words of praise cannot begin to do it justice. But here goes: SAFE SUCIDE is elegantly written, edgy, touching, inventive, surprising in its shifts of style and form, and completely spellbinding from start to finish. Partly memoir, partly a sequence of interlocked essays, this is a book that works its way under your skin and down into your vital organs. It is really, really good.
--Tim O'Brien, author of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED
In this interconnected collection of autobiographical essays, we're brought into the fascinating life of a Boston-area novelist and editor struggling to build a viable writing career, sustain an important literary journal, and become a loving husband, father, and friend. Since these struggles are all accompanied by drama and pain (but also by unexpected pleasures), DeWitt Henry's vivid collection reads like an absorbing coming-of-age memoir. --Chuck Leddy, THE BOSTON GLOBE
Henry's essays in different literary magazines are personal, telling, engrossing. The style is flowing, unpretentious, filled with the details and dialogue of good fiction that bring personal experience to life. In his quiet way, with genuine modesty, he tackles the deepest, most difficult themes and does not flinch from seeing them clearly no matter what they reveal. This is a writer who earns the reader's trust and respect.
--Dan Wakefield, author of GOING ALL THE WAY
Henry is an insightful observer who is also a prose stylist of the first rank.
--Richard Hoffman, author of HALF THE HOUSE
Safe Suicide is a powerful, deeply reflective account of the writer's struggle
to find meaning in our disappointments and the transcendent joy of our successes
in life. In an age where honesty in a memoir has become something of a rare
commodity, it takes real courage to show both our strengths and weaknesses, and
clearly this author is a brave soul. DeWitt Henry, a long distance runner, reminds us all that it is the race itself, not the simple crossing of the finish line, that defines the true
measure of our character.
---- James Brown author of THE LOS ANGELES DIARIES: A MEMOIR
SAFE SUICIDE offers an enthralling portrait of the life of the artist as a husband, a father, an editor, a teacher, a runner, and a dog owner. DeWitt Henry writes with fearless beauty and honesty about his many, often irreconcilable passions. Here is a life lived over time and the result is thought-provoking, absorbing, and deeply moving.
--Margot Livesey, author of BANISHING VERONA: A NOVEL
