In Her Wake: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother's Suicide »

Nancy Rappaport is assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is attending child and adolescent psychiatry consultant to the Cambridge Public Schools and director of school-based programs in child psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A psychiatrist’s haunting memoir of her mother’s suicide illuminates our understanding of family tragedy.

Publishers Weekly

In a fearless memoir of loss and grief, this Harvard Medical School assistant prof, veering between “being a detective and... a realist,” delves into a complex family history haunted by the 1963 death of her mother, a Boston socialite, from an overdose when the author was only four. Using her mother's words from newspaper clippings, notes and a novel she was writing at the time of her death, Rappaport, the youngest of six children, reconstructs a vivacious and deeply troubled wife and mother. “Didn't she know that she would leave all these shattered children wondering if it was their fault?” son Jerry laments 44 years later. Yet in pushing through her parents' turbulent marriage and troubled family history, Rappaport weaves a stunning narrative of perspective, profound sadness and unrelenting hope: “I keep trying to follow in her wake, moving in and out of my grief buoyed by the voyage of exploring her dark reality as a way of helping myself to understand her....” She has also mapped an inspiring course for anyone to dissect family dynamics and mental illness, hoping to understand and, finally, accept. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Sept.)