Girl of Light & Shadow: A Memoir of My Daughter, Who Killed Herself

Girl of Light & Shadow: A Memoir of My Daughter, Who Killed Herself

On July 18, 2018, Elizabeth Anne Valusek, a Peace Corps volunteer, killed herself without warning. Why? To answer that haunting, cosmic question, her father, an award-winning writer, scientist, educator and healthcare professional, embarked on an intense three-year forensic investigation, a biopsychosocial autopsy, an epic Homeric odyssey. Contrary to popular opinion, conventional wisdom, and the deadening, simplistic, one-dimensional narrative of "mental illness" that permeates all public discourse about suicide today, he unearthed a staggeringly complex, interwoven series of incidents and accidents, factors and forces, causes and clues, which, ultimately, made sense of his daughter's devastating death. Suicide, he concludes, is largely a social phenomenon. Valusek's story is an intimate, visceral, darkly humorous, literary, scientific and existential tour de force spanning time and space and a dozen parallel universes, with not just one, but two unexpectedly happy endings -- here, and elsewhere in the multiverse. This is a book about suicide, love, hope and the healing power of the imagination unlike anything you've ever read before.