The Eclipse

"What happens to those of us shattered by the suicide of a loved one? Antonella Gambotto-Burke has given us a voice." - from the foreword by author Anna-Leena Härkönen to the tenth anniversary edition Writer Antonella Gambotto-Burke was awoken at seven one Saturday morning by a telephone call. She could never have anticipated the subsequent devastation.

The Eclipse is a harrowing account of one woman's experience of love and loss. Gambotto-Burke's insights are startling; her ability to make sense of suicide, revolutionary. Does any man have the right to dispose of his own life? This is, she writes, the ultimate debate of moral entitlement. She explains the premise of suicide and how it pivots on a fatal logical flaw. Arguing her case against our understanding of depression and bereavement, she poses a profound question:

If death is a process and not a state, how does that change the experience of grief?

Gambotto-Burke's life has been saturated by death. The first boy who proposed to her shot himself in the head at the age of sixteen. The man she was to marry, the notorious American editor of British GQ, overdosed and died convulsing in an ambulance at 38. And then her brother, gone. Grief is, she writes, something like coals to be walked on.

One of the most important memoirs about loss ever written, The Eclipse is a tribute to love itself. "Because hope has its own biochemistry," Gambotto-Burke writes, "and it sustains."