Data
58 Data. I can imagine someone else, an investigative reporter, getting to know the sources, interviewing people, gathering data in an organized fashion.19 This person would have distance and therefore treat the material more objectively, less personally, perhaps as a sociological profile on suicide. She would be armed to fill in the factual holes, track down medical records, present the data. I can imagine that person in the abstract, but in reality there is no one but me who cares to write. Mine is not the assemblage of an exhaustive account. From the outset I have believed I was trying to write a story about the story, to be in its company. I can’t piece together a seamless, coherent account. Just the opposite. This is a record of my struggle with Joel’s struggle and indicates the limits of what I know and what I understand. 19 In 1999, submitting a grant proposal, I knew I was not this person: “This is no conventional case history, no objective investigation into a suicide in America at the end of the twentieth century. I am no expert on the subject, in the technical sense, having no degree in sociology or psychology. I am not a coroner or clinician. I will not serve up tables with definitive statistics, no demographic breakdowns or age charts. My book gives an antiromantic , antimythologizing treatment to the sober subject of suicide. It is part elegy, part biography, part meditation, part philosophical speculation , part self-interrogation. It is nonlinear, discontinuous, a mosaic of entries, subjects braided together of irregular lengths and styles. Most are brief.” ...
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