Book Talk: Love in the Archives

A memoir by Eileen Vorbach Collins

For months after Lydia died, I would call our home phone from my cell to hear her voice on the answering machine. I wouldn’t talk much, just close my eyes and listened. I always said I love you before hanging up.

Of all the passages I annotated in Love in the Archives: a patchwork of true stories of suicide loss (Apprentice House; November 2023), this one felt so familiar because my sisters and I did the same thing after our mother died. It occurs to me that almost no one has answering machines anymore but I suppose one can save a voicemail on a cell, which is a similar thing. When my dad got rid of his land line and transferred the number to his cell, my sister saved the answering machine with our mamma’s voice on the message. (Mental note to listen the next time I visit.)

I’d had Eileen’s book for quite a while but, to be honest, I delayed starting it because I knew it was centered around her daughter’s suicide. With everything going on in the world and in my personal life, I wasn’t ready to read a book I thought would depress me, even though I felt it was an important book.

I was so wrong.

A “patchwork of stories” is the perfect description of the book’s format. I had envisioned a chronologically laid out story but that’s not at all how it unfolds. Eileen tells Lydia’s story in flash essay-like chapters interspersed with stories and reflections about her own life, about both her children, and more. It’s a patchwork of love, humor, and hurt, just like life itself.

Several chapters talk about Lydia as a child and a teen, about what she loved, her Art, her rebellion, her sense of herself and her quest for discovery. The mother-daughter struggle in Lydia’s teen years resonated, a universal experience for many mothers and daughters.

Eileen’s prose about the suicide and the aftermath is raw, unfiltered, heart-breaking, intimate, and honest. She shares so much of herself that you feel like you’ve been allowed to literally enter her world, like you’re having a personal conversation.

Have you ever thought, after reading a book, that you’d like to be friends with the author? That’s how I felt.

It softens you, a loss like that. Turns you inside-out. Lays bare your organs and makes your heart vulnerable to rupture and your nerves exposed like downed power lines in the wake of the storm. Small hurts that once bounced off your skin now linger with the excruciating agony of a piece of sand in your eye until, oyster-like, you pour your essence over it to smooth the jagged edges.

I learned a lot about the special heartache families of suicide endure. I also learned a lot about perseverance and growth in the aftermath of trauma. I think this is a book that will resonate with everyone, those who have lost loved ones to suicide and otherwise, and those who still have that devastating experience to come.

One year at a time, each one different, each one filled with longing and sadness, with new friends and old ones. Each year will bring tears but also laughter. Maybe not this year, maybe not the next. But when you’re ready, let others into your space. Make room for them. Make room for the laughter.

Available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.