Having read all of Maud’s journals a couple of times, I feel incredibly ambivalent over this news of her alleged suicide. On one hand, I can quite imagine how circumstances would have driven her to it. She never had the least emotional support from a mentally-ill husband and she was the type of person who couldn’t bear the idea of anyone even suspecting that she was less than happy and her life was less than good. She always put on a brave, cheerful face to the world and tried to do her “duty” as she saw it. But then privately she suffered so much, losing her first baby, losing her dearest friend in the world, agonizing day after day through WWI, all those lawsuits with her publishers…stresses that would have her literally pacing the floor for hours at a time and in such a worked up state, it’s amazing to me that she didn’t simply have a stroke.

Her escapes from stress only helped her up to a point. She couldn’t get away to visit P.E.I. as often as she needed to, and that was the one place in the world that rejuvenated her spirit. With the advent of WWII, I’m sure the horror of that, in addition to the thought of her beloved sons ending up in the midst of it, must have been too much to bear. So in that sense, I could almost imagine her ending her life–despite any thoughts of how that would hurt her children or the scandal of it. She would have been too wrapped up in her own pain to think past it, I guess.

And yet it is still hard to imagine her taking that route. It just seems so much to go against who she was, with her incredible imagination and her open-minded view of the afterlife and God, and her devotion to her boys–I can hardly picture her standing to leave them behind, no matter the level of her stress.

I don’t know. Reading her final journal, with all its agonies and her inability, as time passed, to even record them in the most private way, again makes me think that she could have possibly really killed herself. The poor woman was just beyond distraught and WWII must have just seemed the end of the world to her.

I have to add that I hope that this is not some story come to life because of family animosities. Maud was so unhappy over her son’s divorce, I’d suspect there were some ill feelings lingering for a long time afterward. I hope this isn’t some spiteful act of some angry relative, putting out a story like this.

And if it is true, I think it shouldn’t have been publicised anyway. I know it’s important to talk about these things and understand them and in most cases, I would say okay, go ahead. But Maud was just so fiercely private and I think it would have only devastated her to have this sort of thing made public about her. I think her relatives should have just let her rest in peace.

She was such a brilliant, amazing, strong woman. She deserves better. She deserves to be remembered as the gifted writer she was, not as a troubled soul who took her own life.
That really bothers me.

Terri Gross replayed an interview with Wallace that was about 10 years old and he discussed the fact that his parents had to struggle when they were young and were basically happy people. He and his friends had a pretty easy life and were very unhappy. So I expect he was depressed for a long, long time before he suicided.

Yes, that’s true. Lev Grossman wrote an appreciation of Wallace in the September 29 issue of Time, and Wallace’s father is quoted in the article:

Since his death, Wallace’s family has stated that he was chronically depressed. He had been taking medication for his condition for 20 years and had occasionally been hospitalized. “Everything had been tried,” his father said, “and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

What was “it”? In Infinite Jest Wallace wrote–in a passage that now reads like a lucid cell-phone call from the pilot of a crashing 747–that clinical depression is “lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed… Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.”

Anne of Green Gables…*loved* that series as a child, and intend to share it with my own as well.