‘One Friday In April’ Wants To Change Everything You Know About Suicide

Partway through One Friday In April, a bold re-imagining of suicide, author Donald Antrim asks you, the reader, if you have ever thought about killing yourself. “When did you first picture your death?” he probes. “Can you name the day, the hour? What did you see?”

Content Warning: This article contains discussion of suicide and trauma.

In some ways these are rhetorical questions. Antrim knows that for us — the suicidals, the depressives, the mentally ill — the days before and after an attempt are blurred, like figures painted onto a wet canvas.

Antrim’s account of his own suicide attempt is deeply distorted, captured in sketches. He writes of hanging off his rooftop, daring himself to hurl his frame down to the courtyard below. Helicopters buzz overhead. He wonders if he will meet God. He wonders where his friends are. His hands become blistered and sore.

When he steps off the ledge, back to safety, he is no longer making active choices, pivoting to face a comprehendible future. Such things are beyond him. He is a spectre haunting the body of a man named Donald Antrim, perpetually standing two feet behind his own eyes.

One Friday In April And The Shape Of Sickness

This is the rhythm of One Friday in April,  a work of fragments. Antrim admits himself to a hospital, gets discharged, admits himself again.

But he is not still. He is not apathetic. One of the many myths that Antrim dispels in One Friday In April is the picture of the depressive as icy lake, lying flat on her back. Instead, here is an urgency to suicide, a kind of restlessness. “We may feel encased,” he writes. “We may feel as if we are burning, as if our cells have caught fire. We might get only a few hours of medicated sleep, or we may sleep and wake throughout the day, and that can be mistaken for resignation or apathy, but is sickness.”

This word — sickness — comes up again and again in One Friday In April. “When I was sick, I felt that my body was poisoned and poisonous,” writes Antrim, “and that this poison had entered every cell.” Later in the book, when Antrim is offered electro-shock therapy, he asks another patient at the psychiatric hospital if he should accept. “If I were as sick as you,” she replies, “I would.”

You tell the doctors that you want to get better. You’ve only ever wanted to get better.

Eventually he does agree to lie on a table, anaesthetised, and have his brain reset with bolts of electricity. As he waits for the drugs to kick in, counting backwards in his head from one hundred, he considers sickness’ opposite: recovery. He squeezes the nurse’s hand. “You tell the doctors that you want to get better,” he writes. “You’ve only ever wanted to get better.”

But health — as Sylvia Plath, another suicidal, once wrote — is a distant country. One Friday In April is not a self-help book. Antrim does not hold the answers. He knows that the ill should be treated at the hospital — that the imperative for those who want to kill themselves is to go somewhere they cannot. But his is a negative definition of recovery: he shapes what it is, vaguely, by stating what it is not.

The suicide cannot feel or live on hope.

Most of all, it is not a question of stoking hope. “Hope to the suicide is a death sentence,” he writes. “The suicide cannot feel or live on hope. Our hope is gone.” The things that seem like they might help — creativity, family, support groups, therapy — are only fitfully useful. “None of this had stopped my dying,” writes Antrim writes.

Sat in the centre of his despair, he feels shock at the life he once lived, before suicide ever entered his mind. “I had cooked with girlfriends, and read literature, and gone to movies, and acted in plays, and graduated from schools, and run errands,” he marvels.

These things are gone. All he has is the tarpaulin that he sits on to capture the blood, a knife in his hand, writing endless suicide notes addressed to friends, family. And one plain missive, penned in his neat shorthand, that he plans to stick to the front door of his apartment, begging his girlfriend not to enter, saving her the sight of his lifeless body, stretched out across the floor.

The Path Upwards, Into The Light

One Friday In April is divided into two distinct halves. The first is an account of Antrim’s three months in hospital; the shock therapy; the slow, tortured process of re-learning how to cook, how to talk, how to keep his mind from returning to old wounds and traumas. The second is a kind of re-writing. In it, Antrim lays out his case for treating suicide as its own distinct form of mental illness, separate from depression. He writes of himself as “a suicide”, rather than suicidal, the way that an alcoholic is always an alcoholic, whether or not they are actively drinking.

These two halves of the novel speak to one another. They are sisters, conspiring. Only when Antrim is outside of the active throes of suicide can he begin to re-mythologise it: one gets the sense that the naming of his illness is a part of recovery itself. He climbs, messily, towards the light, and when he has reached a place of greater safety, he turns and considers the chalky path he has taken.

The suicide does not want to be alone, but we are often alone.

This re-appraisal is sometimes brutal. “We are burdens to our caretakers,” he writes in one particularly taboo section of the book. “We know this, no matter what you say to soothe us, no matter that you love us.” He understands that the suicide does awful things; makes love difficult. “Even now, in my sixties, if I cry hard, I will be frightened,” he says. “I will not be able to look at you. If you touch me, I will scream in pain and run from the room.”

The suicide does not want to be alone, but we are often alone. This is a matter of survival. For the suicide, as Antrim knows, does not want to die — we want, above everything, to live. But this wanting is its own torment. It traps us in indecision. We are standing in a doorway, still but not still, half of life and half of oblivion. And so we lash out; become difficult; disappear from the world. “If any one feeling has defined my life, it is the feeling, more an awareness than a thought, that only lonely rooms are safe,” writes Antrim.

And yet this is a symptom of the sickness as well, one that, with time, can be cured. At the novel’s end, Antrim finds himself in a room with another soul — his partner, as she aimlessly sends her fingers up and down the piano, the music bouncing across the walls. And he finds himself with you, the reader. You are the one he has been talking to this whole time, of course. You are the one that he has in his mind, that he wants to help, that he believes can get better, however long it takes. He is writing for you, as well as to you. And here, nestled in his pages, is a tiny scrap of mercy, trembling, for you to take.

None of this is easy. But there is a difference between difficulty and impossibility. In its final moments, One Friday In April comes to resemble that other trip through Hell, Dante’s Inferno, and in particular its last few lines — “My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel .. And we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”

If you or someone that you know is struggling, you can contact Lifeline at any time of the day via their helpline at 13 11 14.

One Friday In April is out now through Penguin Random House.

---

Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.