Author Description

Somewhere between a journal and a report, a question and an answer, Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche takes up the "only serious problem in philosophy" and submits it to the only kind of scrutiny proper to it: the personal. In arriving at this "personal" account, however, Nao detours through decidedly un-private, public cultural touchpoints-the lives of celebrities, religion, television shows, sporting events-and in doing so lays bare how even this most subjective of phenomena grows out of an endless encounter with the world. Race has a part in this encounter. So does migration. As does money. Growing out of these entanglements, queer affinities bud and bloom in this text-which, made up of pen-and-ink drawings, photographs, and Nao's playful spin on pilish, is simultaneously constrained and unconstrained-to become the bonds that can make one want to live on.