Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche

Vi Khi Nao

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.

After losing my father to suicide I was given many very thoughtful books about why we sometimes kill ourselves; none of them, even in sum, carried the insight, vision, or credibility of Vi Khi Nao’s SUICIDE: THE AUTOIMMUNE DISORDER OF THE PSYCHE. Achingly un-sentimental, extensively researched, exquisitely illustrated, and overflowing with personal wisdom (and, most importantly, warmth), SUICIDE inhabits a truly novel numbering system to chart a kind of star map to the present condition, a guide to failure, an ode to other people; a way, if we stick together, to survive. —Daniel Uncapher

Vi Khi Nao’s SUICIDE: THE AUTOIMMUNE DISORDER OF THE PYSCHE confronts the universal question of suicide with a scientific curiosity, mathematical precision, and visionary vulnerability that is uniquely their own, and will leave a lasting impression on any reader--especially those who know all-too-well the weight of the titular subject in their lives. — Randall Scott

Vi Khi Nao traces all the ways suicide twisted around her family, her education, her art, and her heart condition in this brilliant memoir. It’s a revealing and honest account of her “suicidal scars of the soul” and the devastating effect that illness has on a life.— Anthony Luebbert

This manuscript. What is it? What is it? The laying out of a life along the razor’s edge of its own annihilation. An investigation of the conditions of its possibility. A reflection on famous suicides. Famous non-suicides. The illnesses within which health is inscribed. Memoir punctuated by image, number, text. Each word a brush stroke. Every metaphor a fatty lump. Constrained by the infinite sprawl of π, Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche opens as a wound into a mind working through what it means to live by passing through the identical question of what it means to die. — FAR WALL

SUICIDE would be an encyclopedic novel if encyclopedic novels were not boring and if instead of trying to capture the full range of the world’s knowledge—like Dante, Joyce, or Pynchon—they attempted to capture insteadwhat knowledge feels like on the brink of death and the cosmic and pragmatic love it takes to keep each other living. Vi Khi Nao knows, too, how short life is and kept it under 153 pages. — CLOSE WALL

VI KHI NAO is the author of six poetry collections: Fish Carcass (Black Sun Lit, 2022), A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line (11:11 Press, 2021), Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her first play, Waiting for God, is out of Apocalypse Party in January 2022. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute: https://www.vikhinao.com