Finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award
NAMED as ONE OF Library Journal’s Best Memoirs of 2022
"A literary triumph"—Terry Tempest Williams
Patterson's lyrical and discerning treatment of a global 'psychological crisis' will keep readers transfixed. —Publisher’s Weekly
A soulful odyssey . . . [Patterson's] bewilderment and edge-of-the-sinkhole grief is palpable —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Juliet Patterson brings us to a brave, smart, and compassionate understanding of suicide. Anyone who has lost someone to suicide knows the haunting that follows. You are buried beneath an avalanche of questions that can never be answered. The somber connections Patterson makes between her father's death by suicide and the family legacy that precedes his death tied to a history of coal mining exposes the fact that our health and the health of the planet cannot be separated. The violence we inflict on ourselves is a mirror of the violence we inflict on land. Patterson is a soaring writer who has chosen to not look away. We are the beneficiaries of her gaze. There is poetry in this elegiac book, with an uncommon beauty and stillness radiating between each sentence. Sinkhole resurrects our dead from the sorrow and silences surrounding suicide and gives voice to the sorrow and silences surrounding suicide and gives voice to the whys of their voiceless acts. —TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
"In confronting her family’s dark legacy of suicide, Juliet Patterson does far more than plumb the depths of human despair. Sinkhole is a master class in the way truth can pry open the deepest cellar, how language can calm a raw, ragged soul. To read this unflinching look at darkness is to find a way toward the light. After so much darkness, so much light!" —MARGARET RENKL
“Juliet Patterson writes with a poet’s precision and a poet’s heart too about that most devastating moment, the loss of a parent. Devastating twice over by the terms and manner in which he died. Survivors are left to ask ‘Why?’ and normally one says there is no answer to this question. But Patterson keeps asking. In this text that has the feel of a police procedural but the emotional weight of a desperation to know, Patterson delves into familial and social history and brings us, the readers, along on a perilous journey. By the end we realize we each too might be—physically, socially, psychologically, spiritually, medically, environmentally—in the midst of life but on the lip of death. As a parent, a poet, a daughter, a wife, a human, Juliet Patterson makes the most courageous foray yet into answering that last unanswerable question: ‘Why?’” —KAZIM ALI
Patterson marvels at the pervasiveness of some of her family members', on both her paternal and maternal sides, dying by suicide . . . Tying together environmental, political, and historical facts in her family tree, the author imagines what it means to take one's life and shares what it's like to be the one left behind. As fascinating as it is upsetting, Patterson has intersected the past and future, imagining the silent crisis happening among the men in her family, as well as the persistent fear of her own potential demise through self-harm, all while considering genetics, societal pressures, and prescribed antidepressants. The end result is an elegantly tragic work of research, history, and creative nonfiction that seeks answers, closure, and ultimate peace." —LIBRARY JOURNAL starred review
A spare, sensitive evocation of Patterson's experience of grief, paired with an insightful work of family and regional history . . . The poet's sensibility is evident in these pages, as she excavates her own raw emotions alongside passages of clear-eyed journalism and creative nonfiction. Sinkhole is a painfully honest and sobering work that may provide insight and comfort to those facing a similar tragedy.'" —SHELF AWARENESS