Carolbobarol asked Julia Glass:

This question contains spoilers… (view spoiler)

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)["I See You Everywhere" stands apart from my other books in that it's the most autobiographical by far. Many events and details in the book are wholly fictional, but the sisters and the dynamics of their relationship are based rather bluntly on me and my younger sister, who did commit suicide. It was a traumatizing shock to all who knew and loved her, and when I realized that I needed to write about how a woman like my sister might give up on life, I did think (briefly) about writing a memoir. But that would have been to undertake an investigation, a kind of detective story--to dig up all the whys and wherefores--and as a fiction writer, I was more interested in the nature of certain sibling relationships . . . and in how it is that, no matter how well we know and love someone, there are limits to that closeness, even to the power of love. You mention that the "ending" is abrupt, but what you mean is the ending of the younger sister's life, not the ending of the book itself, which is the aftermath. And yes, your quotation from Jamison is apt. That event in the story was something I simply couldn't change. And while it may seem abrupt on first reading, if you were to go back and reread the book, you would see foreshadowing and warning signs. Still, I wanted it to be a shock, as suicide so often is.

One thing that will always haunt me is this: I wrote my first story about those sisters (an earlier version of the second story in the book) a year before my sister's death. In it, Louisa worries about the recklessness and fatalism of Clem, yet in the end she downplays that worry. That story, by the way, orginally titled "My Sister's Scar," was the first fiction of mine ever to be published.--years before I wrote my first two novels. Only much later did I decide to write more about Louisa and Clem, and those stories became my third book. The decade that elapsed between my sister's death and my taking on those stories as a book really helped me look back with more perspective if not less emotion. Finishing that book was hard, because it meant reaching the end of a project that some part of me believed might give me a final answer as to the why of it all. Of course, that was wishful thinking. Suicide is an eternal mystery.

As an aside, let me recommend a book that I was asked to read, for endorsement, after I published "I See You Everywhere." It's called "Why Suicide?" by Eric Marcus, and it's the most helpful book I've ever read on the subject. Jamison and other psychologists write brilliantly on the subject, but if you know someone who's been crushed by the suicide of a loved one, Marcus's book is more down-to-earth and really addresses the point that suicide is an eternal unwinding of questions. (hide spoiler)]

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