Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son’s Suicide

A father’s reckoning over his son’s suicide prompts a self-indulgent path of inquiry in this bewildering work by philosophy professor Boothby (Sex on the Couch). When the author’s 23-year-old son, Oliver, shot and killed himself, after years of drug addiction, he left behind a trove of unanswered questions. To quell “the burning need to know... about my part in the whole catastrophe,” Boothby sought psychoanalysis and dove into his own emotional fault lines and suppressed rage. Less than a year later, desperate “to get to the bottom of my soul,” he joined a psilocybin study at Johns Hopkins. Boothby brings readers on his strange trip, one that he confesses was largely inspired by his desire “to do something Oliver had done, to experience for myself the effects of some very powerful drug.” Along the way, he shares multiple drug-induced revelations, such as that “the moment of death is the moment of opening,” and “because love needs its failures, love needs death.” While Boothby expresses disdain for the “phony feel-goodism” of self-help, his own musings have a similar cringe-inducing effect. The disjointed narrative—which jumps around a number of unspecified years—only adds to his befuddled attempts to go deep. It’s a missed opportunity; there are much more substantive takes on the subject elsewhere. (May)