The Other Side of Suicide: Suicide! It's Over! Is It?

by Richard Ford

Overview

The Other Side of Suicide is a virtual reality journey with those left behind; "the Survivors". Those affected by suicide experience a tsunami of emotions; "Soul Trauma" of devastation, destruction, shock, horror and brokenness; lives forever altered and changed!

Suicide knows no bounds. Every age, gender, race, creed, culture, and religion has been affected. Suicide, without regard for anyone, pulls people into a journey that none should have to travel. Every year tens of thousands of people find themselves in what can only be described as "hell on earth."

The journey contained between these pages is painful and intense, yet compassionate. The journey you are about to take is designed to guide "the survivors" to the place of peace they so desperately seek. It's designed to alert and awaken those who have reached a place in life where they feel, "there is no way out," that life is worth living no matter what!

For those with a compassionate heart this journey will prepare them to be "agents of hope" and "vessels of mercy and grace." Equipped to reach out to those who cry in the darkness of hopelessness and the aftermath of suicide. Ready to bring hope and to be a part of healing the brokenhearted!

The Other Side of Suicide is a journey that will forever change your life!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781483537771
Publisher:	BookBaby
Publication date:	10/02/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	115
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Richard Ford lived with his parents in Jackson, Mississippi, until he was eight years old, at which time his father suffered a near-fatal heart attack. After that, he shuttled back and forth between his parents' home in Jackson and Little Rock, Arkansas, where his maternal grandparents managed a hotel. Ford describes his childhood as happy and contented -- at least until he was 16, when his father died and the young man began to seriously think about his future.

Although he attended Michigan State University with the vague intention of going into hotel management, Ford soon switched over to literature. After graduation, he married his college sweetheart, Kristina Hensley, but was having trouble settling on a career direction. He applied for several jobs (including the police and the CIA!) and even started law school. It was only after none of these panned out that he begin to consider writing for a living. On the advice of a former teacher, he applied to graduate school and was accepted into the University of California at Irvine, where he came under the happy, unexpected tutelage of Oakley Hall and E. L. Doctorow.

He began work on his first novel, the story of two drifters whose lives intersect on a desolate island in the Mississippi River. An excerpt appeared in The Paris Review, and the book was accepted for publication. In 1976, A Piece of My Heart was released to good reviews, but Ford bristled at being pigeonholed by critics as a regional writer. "I'm a Southerner, God knows," Ford said in an interview with the literary journal Ploughshares, "but I always wanted my books to exist outside the limits of so-called Southern writing."

In the early '80s, Ford's wife (who holds a Ph.D. in urban planning) was teaching at NYU, and the couple was living in Princeton, New Jersey. Disillusioned with novel writing, Ford took a job with the glossy New York magazine Inside Sports, but in 1982 the magazine folded, leaving him unemployed again. Tentatively he returned to fiction with the glimmer of a story idea based loosely on his most recent experiences. Several years in the making, The Sportswriter introduced Frank Bascombe, a middle-aged writer from suburban New Jersey who forsakes his promising literary career to pen articles for a glossy New York magazine. Published in 1986, the novel was named one of Time magazine's five best books of the year and was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award.

Ford claims that he never intended to write a trilogy around Frank Bascombe. But, in between other literary projects (including an acclaimed 1987 short story collection, Rock Springs), he found himself inexorably drawn back into the life of his melancholic protagonist. In 1995, the superb sequel, Independence Day, won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Then, in 2006, Ford concluded the saga with The Lay of the Land, a bittersweet set piece nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Although Ford modestly maintained that the only reason he won the Pulitzer Prize was that Philip Roth had not written a novel that year, in fact his angst-ridden suburban Everyman Frank Bascombe ranks alongside Roth's Nathan Zuckerman (or, for that matter, John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom) as one of American literature's most unforgettable, richly drawn characters. For a man who stumbled into writing with very little forethought or design, Richard Ford has indeed come far.

Date of Birth:

February 16, 1944

Place of Birth:

Jackson, Mississippi

Education:

B.A., Michigan State University, 1966; M.F.A., University of California, Irvine, 1970