"Against Suicide" ought to be the subtitle, in the form of an Athenian orator's prosecution speech.

The scholarly side of the work discusses instances of suicide, along with trauma and depression, as portrayed in Ancient Greek drama. It is not scholarship, in it being the author's interpretations and feelings about the works, but it is informed by scholarship and done with an expert's familiarity. I appreciated (in part because I feared) that most of the takes are 'deep cuts' and not reiterations on the same well-known plays. To the extent that there is a thesis, it is that the Ancient Greeks had a complex and subtle take on mental illness, full of suggestions that they spent a lot of time grappling with the psychological damage of war for instance.

I loved it. Hall's passion spills over every page. The asterisk would be that I think that a reader might get the impression that the author is providing a definitive or accepted interpretation, where I think that is not the case. Or at least I have heard plenty of well-supported versions of what things in these works are meant to represent. 'Yes, Logan,' I argue with myself, 'that's theater.' But maybe we need to create a distinction between the dramaturgical and the scholarly. It is a great read though.

(About the only thing that I thought was missing was Neoptolemus. If you want to talk family trauma, whooo. But that gets better expressed in the Roman corpus, so it gets a pass.)

The non-scholarly side of the work is a half-history, half-memoir on the author's own family and the members who have commit suicide, including the author's own suicidal ideation and mental health crises. At points, this feels the more polemical side of the work. Akin to her work on Aristotle, the book is the secular argument against suicide, which centers around the trauma in others that it produces and the harm it does to their lives, and importantly the lives of those that they then touch and the trauma they induce in others.

These sections feel like handling hot coals. Vulnerability is the source of all good art, but the discussion here is so intimate that I feel uncomfortable in reading it, much less writing something about what I think about reading it. I want to believe that I connect to this, that it has been a positive experience for me, but I just don't know. Mental health in general suffers in darkness, but I almost feel like this brings too much light. Or at least let's say that the amazing degree of artful disclosure and feeling that Hall makes into words feels like anything I could do is shameful for not having that.

Even though Hall makes a visit to the places and the records of her ancestors, at points my credibility meter started to go off. There are times when the author makes reasonable suppositions and guesses about things in her family's past. While these guesses are reasonable, they often end up serving as the buttress for others around the theme of intergenerational trauma. And while she does hedge her language, it itched my mind at points.

But whatever the weaknesses floating around, the power and the warmth of the book is worth it. When the author starts relating her own direct experiences, more certain in her situating and its relationship to the familial relationships in her life, is when the book feels the most true to its cause.

Thanks the author and the publisher for making the ARC available to me.