#7 Hush by Eishes Chayil

Question:

How many young adult books did I read in 2011 that featured a young person committing or attempting to commit suicide?

Answer:

8

In Hush, our protagonist must deal with the personal and social aftermath of her best friend’s suicide. In fact, her dead friend still seems to haunt her, six years after the event. Although emotionally gripping, this is not exactly a fresh story formation. In fact, Nina Lacour’s Hold Still – which I read within the same month as Hush and talked about last week– is basically the same concept. I was going to blame Jay Asher’s immensely popular 13 Reasons Why, maybe even Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls,  but even just looking at my own 2011 reading, this is a historically common YA theme. Heck, even Forever… took a break from all the sexy-sex for poor Sexually-Confused Side-Character Artie to attempt to kill himself! As if that book were not overly dramatic enough…

Hush, however, made me forget about the rest of the bunch. Protagonist, Gittel, lives in a highly secluded Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, and everything about her life revolve around her religion and her society – her world, her grief, and the circumstances surrounding her best friend Devory’s death.

Gittel’s pain is just as complexly rendered as any surviving character in these suicide narratives, but Hush is also engages in an examination of the societal factors that led an 11-year-old girl to kill herself, and keep Gittel from fully expressing and understanding her grief. The author, Chayil, is herself a member of a Chassidic community, writing with a pseudonym and recalling actual events that occurred within her community. Realizing this fact while I read had two effects. First, and most obviously, the tragedy had much more impact knowing that this is, actually, not the stuff of history but a pattern that occurs today in these communities. But second, I found myself more engaged with Gittel’s struggle, imagining that this is how many young women in Chassidic communities must feel. Gittel wants to understand and talk about her friend’s death, but she also wants to live up to her role as an Orthodox woman – to marry and have children – and to earn respect from her community and God. Gittel can’t speak up without bringing shame to herself and her family, but she can’t forget what happened to Devory.

Chayil also recently un-pseudonymed herself in The Huffington Post: from this article and reading the book, I think Chayil wrote this novel as a way to grapple with her own conflicts as a Chassidic woman and expose some of the dangerous patterns that the community would otherwise keep under wraps.

So fascinating, so heartbreaking, and I basically couldn’t put it down.