Book Review - Headlong

Headlong by Susan Varga
University of Western Australia Press, $29.95

There are so many books on grief around at the moment. Here’s another, told in the first person, which makes it immediately intimate and confessional. Tough and unsparing, it’s the story of a devoted daughter struggling with a mother who is suffering from depression following the death of her husband. After failing suicide on her own, she asks her daughter if she will help. As if the moral dilemma were not hard enough, the practicalities are equally challenging – though not without their own very dark humour – and the impact on other people is well drawn. Books like this can help people in a similar position feel less isolated and more prepared for the internal turmoil and conflicts such situations provoke.