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 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.

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Madeline Vosch is a writer, a translator, and a professor. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, the Washington Post, and The Rumpus, among others. She was awarded the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Award for Nonfiction and was an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow.