Wickersham refuses to settle for sentimental, simplistic answers. Her absorbing narrative is suffused with a profound longing to understand what went wrong in her father's life. She discovers a number of problems he worked mightily to conceal: large debts from a business failure, a complicated relationship with his in-laws (who had invested money in his failed business), a potential affair between his wife and a family friend, and a personal history of physical and verbal abuse by his own father. She learns tantalizing scraps of information, but can't integrate them: "It was all going to be fragments, a snarl. All these bits would keep coming . . . Nobody knew the whole of it."
She learns, for example, that a year before his suicide her father had started a business importing doors, and that the author's father-in-law, Neil, had invested too. The business failed and the bank called in the loan, which her father couldn't pay off. "It looked like the bank was going to turn its sights on Neil," writes Wickersham. She and her dad had spoken about these financial problems at a Cambridge café. After much prodding, he told her, "Sometimes I feel like everything I touch turns to [expletive]." Shocked by this admission from her stubbornly reticent father, Wickersham said nothing: "The silence went on and on."
In addition to tirelessly investigating the facts of her father's life, Wickersham looks inward, trying to understand how the suicide has impacted her life and family. She admits to feeling fiercely protective of her father's memory, even as others criticized what he'd done. "I was angry at a lot of people," writes Wickersham, "but not at him . . . I accepted everything about him, except that he was the author of his own absence."
