Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious »

Alix Strauss is a lifestyle trend writer who appears on national morning and talk shows. Her articles have been published in the New York Times, Marie Claire, Time, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. She is the author of The Joy of Funerals, Have I Got a Guy for You, and Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious.

Kurt Cobain, Anne Sexton, Mark Rothko, Ernest Hemingway, Adolf Hitler . . . all famous, some rich and powerful, some beloved, some abhorred. But when life and circumstance got to be too much, each headed for the exit door. Sigmund Freud overdosed on morphine. Dorothy Dandridge stripped naked and swallowed a handful of antidepressants. Hunter S. Thompson shot himself while talking to his wife on the phone.

These are the lonely personal nightmares behind celebrity suicides—the deaths and their causes are as diverse as the victims themselves. In Death Becomes Them, Alix Strauss bids each one a final good-bye while examining the last days and the unbearable incidents that drove these notables to end their lives. She decodes their notes, touches on their accomplishments, and delves into the methodologies of their deaths using autopsy and police reports and personal photos. Strauss also explores the morbid curiosity that feeds our fixation with famously tortured souls and provides lists of other controversial, bizarre, and poorly executed suicides in this mammoth tome.

Publishers Weekly

For those who never miss the obits, this odd little compendium of true suicide stories from author Strauss (The Joy of Funerals, Have I Got a Guy for You) may scratch a certain itch. Focusing mainly on creative types-writers, actors, musicians and artists-Strauss strikes a genial tone infused with plenty of gallows humor; Sylvia Plath's tale is amended with a breezy sidebar on the troubled poet's method of self-execution, an oven fueled by coal gas: "Cheaper than pills, easier than hanging, and less messy than the remnants from a gunshot, death by coal was quick, painless, and, most important, easily accessible." Strauss's giddy enthusiasm for the topic manifests in easy jokes and glib chapter titles ("Not the Suite Life: Ten Hotel Suicides"), as well as lists of facts that read dangerously close to DIY instruction. One can almost forgive the relentlessly upbeat tone, however, as the book proves hopelessly dreary, even for the most morbid of tabloid-readers.
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