Love in the Archives: a patchwork of true stories about suicide loss

by Eileen Vorbach Collins

Overview

When her fifteen-year-old daughter Lydia ends her life, Eileen finds support in a community of bereaved parents who understand her pain on a level others cannot. No one in the group places a time limit on this grief. As the years pass, Eileen finds ways to honor the memories. She even learns to laugh again.

In Love in the Archives, a collection of linked narrative essays incorporating themes of surviving suicide loss, Judaism, interfaith marriage, and mental illness, Eileen walks us through those difficult years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781627204910
Publisher:	Apprentice House
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

Eileen Vorbach Collins' award-winning essays have been widely published. A Baltimore native, she holds a degree in nursing from the University of Maryland and a masters in pastoral care from Loyola. Eileen began writing as a way to process her grief after her daughter's suicide. Her essays uniquely fuse pathos with joy and everyday subjects with the big questions, while holding space for humor. Eileen lives in North Carolina with her husband, Hugh, and Sugar, possibly the world's oldest living Labrador.

Editorial Reviews

This book has the one key element that I believe every memoirist aspires to achieve: as a reader, I felt that Vorbach Collins was talking directly to me. Her voice is real, and she shares details that make it so easy to picture what she is describing.

Hippocampus Magazine - Amy Fish

Eileen Vorbach Collins's new memoir-in-essays, Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of Stories About Suicide Loss, is about the liminal space of parental grief and the big questions that inevitably follow: What happened to that which animated my beloved's physical form? What is real? How can I go on?

LA Review of Books - Melissa M. Monroe

Love in the Archives steers clear of platitudes and solutions du jour. Instead, we get a glimpse into the never-ending process of learning to love a child who has died while refusing to ignore the very real regret that will forever walk beside that love.

The Atticus Review - Casey Mulligan Walsh

"...In prose as clear and concise as can be, from a heart that hopes to heal, Collins reaches a benchmark in the grieving process in which memory really does become a blessing. The result is breath-taking and breath-giving."  -Madeleine Blaise, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of the family memoir, Uphill Walkers, winner of the NYC NAMI Ken Book Award

"...a lesson for other bereaved parents, families and friends, as well as clinical providers, clergy and support system personnel." -John S. Jeffreys, EdD, FT (ADEC), Assistant Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

"I am grateful to have met Collins' perspicacious daughter Lydia through this book, grateful to be able to grieve her along with Collins (who is wildly perspicacious, herself.) Love in the Archives is a necessary, energizing addition to the library of suicide loss." -Gayle Brandeis, author of The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother's Suicide and Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, The Body, and Loss

From the Publisher