Book launch for Anne Whitehead's "Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Perspective"

ABOUT THE EVENT

Please join us for an in-person event to mark the publication of Anne Whitehead’s Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Perspective.

The book is one of the first monographs in Bloomsbury Academic’s Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities series.

The event will be hosted by Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities. Angela Woods, Professor of Medical Humanities at Durham University and Director of the institute, and Linda Anderson, Professor Emerita of Modern English and American Literature at Newcastle University, will introduce the event. Anne Whitehead will then read from the book and be in conversation with Patricia Waugh, Professor Emerita of English Literature at Durham University.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Departing from the prevailing narrativization of suicide in terms of why it happened, Whitehead turns instead to the questions of when, how, and where, calling attention to suicide's materiality as well as its materialization. By turns provocative and deeply affecting, this book brings suicide into conversation with the critical medical humanities, extending beyond individual pathology and the medical institution to think about subjective and social perspectives, and to open up the various sites, scenes and interactions with which suicide is associated. Combining critical and textual analysis with personal reflection based on her own experience of her sister's suicide, Whitehead examines the days, months, and years following a death by suicide. This pivoting of attention to what happens in the wake of suicide brings to light the often-surprising ways in which suicide is woven into the everyday places that we inhabit, and in which it is related to all of us, albeit with varying degrees of proximity and kinship.