Join us for the book launch of Undead: A Memoir of My Suicide by Madeline Vosch, featuring a live musical set from MAITA.
A revealing memoir about the complicated truths of surviving a suicide attempt and rethinking the concept of "suicide prevention" to create a world that people want to live in.
Madeline Vosch did everything she was supposed to do when the suicidal thoughts started. Or she tried. Between studying, working three jobs to make rent, navigating the impossible bureaucracy of Boston's welfare system to access food stamps and nominally affordable mental health care, there was not a moment she was not fixated on survival. One night in April 2018, weeks before her graduation from Harvard Divinity school, she walked home from a party with a single intention: to take as many pills as she could stomach, and never wake up.
But then she did. And she was left with a question: what now?
In Undead, Vosch deftly weaves together lyric prose, memoir, and cultural commentary to tell the story of what happens after a suicide attempt. Here, she sets off on a journey to find her kindred spirits in surviving the end of a story, investigating the various scripts she encountered in the weeks and months after her attempt—from other works of art that touch on the topic of suicide, to Christian theology, to medical texts, to episodes of ER, to the news cycle as reports of increased suicide rates confirmed her suspicion: she was not alone in her attempt, even if she had no one to talk to about what came after. She might be changed, but what did that matter if the world that had ground her down wasn't?
Vosch turns the concept of "suicide prevention" on its head, asking what it might look like to reconceive suicidality as a response to a social problem. She challenges us to incorporate "prevention" into a larger social vision that intersects with increased access to housing, to food, to healthcare—in short, creating a world that people can and want to live in.
"Harrowing, completely without flinch, Madeline Vosch's Undead may be the most uncomfortably human book I've ever read."
— Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment
"Madeline Vosch's Undead is a rare, ferocious memoir—scrappy, brilliant, and impossible to put down."
— Greg Marshall, author of Leg
Madeline Vosch
Madeline is a writer, translator, and professor. Her first book, Undead: A Memoir of My Suicide, was published by Beacon Press. An excerpt of Undead was selected as the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest in 2021. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant and was an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow in 2021. Madeline is represented by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency.
Madeline teaches at a community college and feels an affinity with all monsters.