Can a Ghostwriter Help Me Write About Losing Someone to Suicide?

A book about losing someone to suicide is a touchy subject. If you want to write one, though, why not?

I get why people hesitate. Families who lose someone this way end up carrying two things at once: the grief, and the silence everyone else builds around it. Relatives stop saying the name and friends change the subject. The person who died starts to disappear from conversation, and within a few years they exist only as the way they died. A book pushes back against that. It puts the whole person on the page, with a name and a laugh and a history, where nobody can edit them out.

My wife Claudia died of sepsis in 2005, so I know grief from the inside. A suicide loss carries a weight mine didn’t, the questions nobody can answer, and I don’t know that part firsthand. I do know how to help a grieving person get a life onto paper, and I know the book is worth writing.

Close to fifty thousand people in the United States die by suicide every year, by the CDC’s count, and each of those deaths leaves a circle of people behind. Parents and children are in it, along with brothers and sisters and the friends who worked beside them for years. That circle carries the loss for decades, and most of it carries the loss without much company, because the people around them don’t know what to say and so say nothing.

Grief after a suicide comes tangled up with questions other losses don’t raise. Survivors replay the last conversation and wonder what they missed, and they feel the whispers at work or at church even when nobody says a word to their face. That weight is why loss survivors are encouraged to find support early, from a support group or a counselor. A memoir from somebody who lived through it shows the next family that the guilt isn’t a verdict and that people come through this loss to build full lives.

Can a ghostwriter help me write a memoir about a suicide loss?

Yes. A ghostwriter who writes memoirs has sat across from grieving people before, and the process is the same one I use for any grief memoir, with more care in a few places.

Grief memoirs go well, in my experience, because the client wants the book badly. Nobody commissions a book about the worst year of their life on a whim. You’ll show up to the interviews, you’ll answer the hard questions eventually, and you’ll read every chapter the day it arrives. That motivation carries a project through the sessions where you can’t get a sentence out.

A recent client of mine wrote about losing a daughter suddenly, about forty years before we started. That was a different loss from yours, and the subject still took several passes before it was right. Forty years made the book possible, and it still wasn’t easy. Keep that in mind before you decide you’ve waited too long or not long enough.

My article on working with a ghostwriter after losing a spouse or child covers the grief process in general, and everything in it applies here.

Should a ghostwritten suicide loss memoir focus on the death or on the person?

The person. Then you, and the life you’ve built since.

The death is one day. Your brother lived thirty or forty years, or your daughter lived nineteen, and every one of those years had something in it worth putting on a page, from the terrible jokes to the argument at Christmas that nobody ever settled. A reader who finishes your book should know who that person was, and should miss them a little.

Ask the people who loved them for one story each, from the college roommate to the cousin who only saw them at reunions. You’ll hear things you never knew, and you’ll end up with a fuller person on the page than any single memory could give you. Do you know what your brother was like at work? Somebody does.

After that, the book is about you. Write what the loss did to your marriage and to your faith in your own judgment, and how you got through the first year and the fifth. Readers who pick up a book like this are hunting for proof that somebody survived the thing they’re living through, and your survival is the proof.

Nobody has a perfect life, and readers want to know what went wrong and how you recovered. That rule holds here too. You don’t have to have recovered completely. You have to show that you’re still here and still living. Show how the grief changed shape over time.

What should a ghostwriter leave out of a memoir about suicide?

How it happened. Leave the method out entirely.

Suicide prevention organizations publish guidelines for writers, and near the top of the list is a request that nobody describe the means. Detail about method puts vulnerable readers at risk, and your book is going to find vulnerable readers, because grieving people are exactly who reads it. You can say your son died by suicide. You don’t need to say anything more about the death than that, and I won’t write anything more.

The same guidelines ask writers to avoid two other things. Don’t present the death as a solution or an escape from pain, however much a grieving parent wants to believe that. And don’t write it as a mystery with one answer in the final chapter. Suicide doesn’t come from a single cause, and a book that pins it on one person or one event wounds the living and misleads the reader.

Use “died by suicide.” The older phrase with “committed” comes from when suicide was treated as a crime, and families hear that.

If they left a note, keep it out of the book. It belongs to the family, and no stranger needs it.

Leave out the parts that belong to other people, too. Your sister’s grief and your father’s guilt belong to them. You can say what you saw, and let them tell their own stories.

What are ghostwriting interviews like after a suicide loss?

Slow, with plenty of tears. Clients cry in my interviews all the time, and nobody expects a suicide loss to be the exception.

When it happens, I don’t push. I drift to something easy and unrelated, the house you grew up in or what your brother was like at twelve, and we come back to the painful material a session or two later. You’ll approach the worst of it over several sessions. That’s how it works for everybody, and you’re not doing it wrong.

When a client reaches something they can’t face, I offer to leave it out. Almost every time, that offer makes them insist it goes in. Permission to stop is what lets you keep going.

Every session gets recorded, and a summary goes to you afterward, so you never have to carry the entire conversation in your head. I deliver the book chapter by chapter. A current client cried reading the first chapter because, she said, I’d caught her perfectly. You’ll probably cry too. You’ll also see your person on the page, alive in a scene, for the first time in years.

If the interviews knock you flat for days afterward, tell me and we’ll slow down. If they bring you somewhere darker than that, stop and get help first. If you’re struggling yourself, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US. The book will wait for you.

Can a ghostwriter keep my family’s privacy in a suicide loss memoir?

It can, and you should decide how much privacy you want before the first interview.

At the kickoff I tell every client never to tell me anything they don’t want in the book. That rule matters more here than anywhere. Families carry details about a suicide that they’ve never told anyone, and some of them should stay that way. Decide at the start which ones.

Talk to the family before you publish. You don’t need their permission to tell your own story, but you do need to know who’ll be hurt and how badly. A recent coaching-book client had a whole family chapter struck because the family didn’t want to be in it. Would you want to find a book about your own grief on a shelf with no warning? Give them the courtesy of a conversation, even if they don’t get a veto.

If your family can’t take it, or if the stigma in your town is still thick enough to follow your kids to school, publish under a different name. My article on writing a memoir under a pen name goes through how that works. Change names and identifying details throughout. The book loses nothing, and the people you’re protecting keep their privacy.

Suppose somebody in the story behaved badly, a relative who blamed you at the funeral or a provider who didn’t return a call. I’ll brief you on the legal risks and show you how to change details so the truth stays and the lawsuit doesn’t. My article on writing about family without a lawsuit or a family rupture covers that ground.

Can a ghostwritten suicide loss memoir include anger at the person who died?

It can, and if you’re angry, it should. Survivors get furious at the person they lost, and then feel guilty for being furious. Leave that out and the book reads like a greeting card. Is that the book you want your name on?

Clients drift toward one of two extremes when they tell their stories. They make the person a saint, or they put themselves on trial for every missed sign. I talk them toward the middle. Your brother could be funny and impossible in the same week, and you could love him and still be angry that he’s gone.

Divorce memoir clients start out hurt and wanting to settle scores, and I coach them toward balanced wording that tells the truth and holds up legally. Grief anger gets the same treatment. Say what you felt, in your own words, and let the reader see the love under it. Readers who’ve lost someone will recognize both, and they’ll trust you more for admitting the anger than for hiding it.

How long after a suicide loss should you hire a ghostwriter?

When you can talk about the person for an hour without the conversation destroying the rest of your week. For some people that’s a year. For the client who lost a daughter, it was forty.

Memoirs about caregiving get written years afterward, never in the middle of the crisis, and grief works the same way. In the first months you’re surviving, and a book asks you to look straight at the thing you’re surviving. Don’t sign a contract in that state. Write notes if you want. Save the voicemails and anything with their handwriting on it, because those give me the material that brings a person back onto a page.

Watch the calendar, too. Anniversaries hit hard, so schedule interviews away from the date of the death and from their birthday, and give yourself a lighter week around both.

Then wait until you’re ready to tell it, and tell it. There’s no deadline, and there’s no point where the story expires.

What can a ghostwritten suicide loss memoir do for readers?

Your book will reach people you’ll never meet, in the worst month of their lives.

Some of them just lost someone. They’ll read your book at two in the morning because nobody around them will talk about it.

Your chapter on the first year will tell them that what they’re feeling has a shape and an end. Some of them are struggling themselves, and a book that shows the damage a suicide leaves in a family, and shows that help exists, gives them a reason to call someone. Put a resources page at the back with the 988 Lifeline and the organizations that helped you. It costs you a page, and for one reader in a bad month it could count for more than every chapter before it.

And some readers are the people who whispered, the neighbors and relatives who stopped saying the name. Your book shows them what their silence cost you. I don’t have a lot of patience for people who treat a suicide in the family as something shameful to be hidden. A book sitting on the shelf with your person’s name on the cover does more to shut that down than any argument could.

For grief that’s still too heavy to say out loud, my article on what to do when your story feels too painful to tell a ghostwriter has practical ways to get the words out.

How do you start a ghostwritten memoir about losing someone to suicide?

Gather what you have of them, the photographs and any recording of their voice. Write down five stories about them that have nothing to do with how they died. Those five stories are the spine of the book, and they’re enough for a first conversation.

The Memoir Hub collects everything I’ve written on grief and on getting a life onto the page. My memoir process explains how I work, one session and one chapter at a time, at a pace you set.

Your person has disappeared from too many conversations already. Put their name back on something that’ll outlast every one of those silences.

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