You Can't Catch Death: A Daughter's Memoir - Hardcover

Brautigan, Ianthe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031225296X ISBN 13: 9780312252960

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 2000

Synopsis

The only child of suicide victim and writer Ianthe Brautigan describes her efforts to learn about her father; her reminiscences of him as a warm and witty artist; her coming-to-terms with his life and death, and her own journey through grief. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Ianthe Brautigan's first book, You Can't Catch Death, is a profoundly moving memoir of her famous father and the effect of his suicide on her. Richard Brautigan, one of the more idiosyncratic of the Beat writers, wrote odd, elliptical, brilliant novels--Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur--that, in their heyday, gave him the profile of a popstar. However, Brautigan's star faded and he had as much difficulty dealing with fame as he did with the loss of it. Brautigan kept writing (Sombrero Fallout is a great example of one of his later books), until his suicide in 1984, but his now unfashionable work was slated or worse, simply ignored--only recently has attention come back to how fine some of his work actually was.

An alcoholic, Brautigan was difficult to live with yet, in his daughter's intimate account, comes across as a brilliant, funny, clever artist brought down by the booze he downed by the shedload to silence whatever demons it was that haunted him. Brautigan first told his daughter Ianthe that he wanted to kill himself when she was just nine years old and so, in a sense, she had always lived with his suicide, even before it actually happened. This book is her way of coming to terms with the death of a father that she obviously loved a great deal, despite how difficult he sometimes was to live with. The book, notwithstanding its difficult subject matter, is a wonderfully human account of growing up in the presence of such an uproarious and unconventional man. Ianthe, like her father, writes beautifully, often using very similar conceits to him--very short chapters that are the explication of an odd, unbalancing title; wild metaphors that seem at once inflated or off-kilter and yet which scan surprisingly well. The chapters deal with Ianthe's childhood in Montana, her visits to her father in Japan, and with the ghost of her father, ever present in her dreams and life, as she negotiates his death, bringing up her own child, and the difficult and climatic meeting with Richard's mother, her grandmother, who she never knew. This is a warm, very readable, thought-provoking tribute to an important and neglected writer.--Mark Thwaite

Review:

"poignant and restrained...Brautigan's portrait of her father is as warm as it is unflinching, as generous as it is honest. It is also the story of one woman's journey towards forgiveness, not only of the father who abandoned her, but also of herself, for having 'failed' in some way to save him." (Sunday Herald)

"touching ... wonderfully distilled." (London Review of Books)

"What emerges is a frank and compelling narrative of great integrity which details fascinatingly the minutiae of her father's life...There is absolutely no self-indulgence in You Can't Catch Death, only a desire to lay Richard Brautigan's ghost to rest with dignity" (The Herald)

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 031225296X
• ISBN 13: 9780312252960
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 209