Six months had passed since my brother had gassed himself, and still I could not write a word. And then, one day, that click - as Brick says in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “the click in my head that makes me feel peaceful” - and the words poured from me.
The result is The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide, my most intense and unifying work. It touches me in the way no other writing of mine does, if only because it is my core truth: the truth of my brother’s life, and that of his death; what it was to be his sister and what it is to have lost him; and how in losing him, I found myself.
I still receive communications from survivors and from the suicidal, telling me that they have come to a new understanding of the desire for suicide, and that this has led to the profound experience of forgiveness - both of themselves and those they lost.
If I sound too much like the Dalai Lama here, know this: my wrath can be borderless, serpentine, as far from forgiveness as hate is to art. But even so, I know what it is to forgive, and the experience is something like having a slab of granite lifted from your breast, and from the source of life itself.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
is a novelist and journalist. She has worked for The Australian, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Harpers Bazaar, HQ, The Independent on Sunday, Playboy, The Sydney Morning Herald, The South China Morning Post and others.
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The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
by Antonella Gambotto-Burke
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Free Sample of The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide 7 December 2008 Six months had passed since my brother gassed himself, and still I could not write a word. And then, one day, that click - as Brick says in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “the click in my head that makes me feel peaceful” - and words poured from my core.The result is The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide, my most intense and unifying work. It touches me in the way no other writing of mine does, if only because it is my truth: the truth of my brother’s life,
The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide (Premium Content Audiobook) 8 December 2008 “My mind was no more than a shifting tray of shattered crystal, bits of glass, my own teeth may have been amongst the mess.”
- from The Eclipse
Novelist Antonella Gambotto-Burke was awoken at seven one Saturday morning by a telephone call. She could never have anticipated the subsequent devastation.
The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide is an astonishing account of one woman’s experience of love and loss. Gambotto-Burke’s insight and compassion are startling; her ability to make sense of suicide, revolutionary.
Does any man have the right to dispose of his own life? This is, she writes, the ultimate debate of moral entitlement. She explains the premise of suicide and how it pivots on a fatal logical flaw. Presenting an eloquent case against our understanding of depression and bereavement, she poses a profound question:
If death is a process and not a state, how does that change the experience of grief?
Arguably the most important memoir ever written about loss, The Eclipse hypnotizes the reader from the outset. Gambotto-Burke’s life has been saturated by death. The first boy who proposed to her shot himself in the head at the age of sixteen. Michael VerMeulen, her fiance and the legendary American editor of British GQ, overdosed on cocaine at the age of 38. And then her baby brother, gone.
Grief is, she writes, something like coals to be walked upon.
Passionate and magnificently written, The Eclipse should be given to anyone whose heart has been torn out by loss, and to those who want to love without fear.
The remainder of The Eclipse is available as Premium Content. You can purchase a copy of The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide in paperback format from Broken Ankle Books.
Six months had passed since my brother had gassed himself, and still I could not write a word. And then, one day, that click - as Brick says in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “the click in my head that makes me feel peaceful” - and the words poured from me. 
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
is a novelist and journalist. She has worked for The Australian, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Harpers Bazaar, HQ, The Independent on Sunday, Playboy, The Sydney Morning Herald, The South China Morning Post and others. 
