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October 14, 2008
A Brother's Suicide
Christopher Lukas is a successful Emmy award winning writer. His older brother Tony was a New York Times journalist who won two Pulitzer prizes. Tony suffered depressions, plagued by feelings of not being good enough, and committed suicide.
In his book Blue Genes, Christopher examines their lives and relationships and their shared experiences growing up in their gifted but suicide and depression haunted family. When they were children their mother committed suicide, but they were told only that she died and immediately rushed away to residential school. Grandmother, uncle, aunt, and best friend were also suicides, and father, an eminent civil rights lawyer, drank himself to death.
Christopher reveals his feelings of abandonment and anger and guilt in response to these suicides. He fears he might follow the self-destructive family pattern, but he compares himself to Tony. Tony was dangerously obsessed with a need to out compete his rivals. Christopher writes, “While I eventually took these matters up with psychoanalysts, Tony took them up with no one.”
Related Links:
- Blue Genes at Doubleday Publishing
Posted by admin at October 14, 2008 02:41 PM