What I Actually Thought About Granville Stokes' Book

The Last Time I Committed Suicide hit my Kindle in late 2016 and I put it down twice before finishing. Not because it was bad. Because it was exhausting. I went back to it on a Sunday afternoon and got through it in one sitting. Here's what I actually think about it, and how it holds up if you're trying to decide whether it's worth your time. The book works because it refuses to resolve itself. Most memoirs about mental health collapse eventually into some neat takeaway — a lesson learned, a faith restored, a therapist who changed everything. Stokes doesn't do that. The narrative stays tangled. He writes about his father's early death, his struggles with substance abuse, his career as a playwright, and his recurring suicidal ideation without tying any of those threads together into a clean moral. That's the part people either love or walk away from. There's no middle ground. One thing I noticed reading it a second time: Stokes uses the suicide attempt as a structural device, not just a biographical event. The title refers to a specific moment, but the book keeps circling back to attempts and near-attempts throughout different periods of his life. The pattern matters more than the individual incidents. He maps them out with enough specificity that you can see the triggers, the dead zones between episodes, the moments where he almost chose differently. It's almost clinical in how he tracks it, which is odd for a book that's also deeply personal.

I ran into a minor issue with one of the audiobook versions floating around. The narrator rushes through the middle section where Stokes discusses his time in treatment centers, making it hard to follow the timeline. If you're listening instead of reading, grab the print edition or make sure you're on the publisher's official recording. The audio version published by Books on Tape runs about eleven hours and the pacing there is fine. It's the abridged versions that flatten the whole thing. People sometimes confuse this with a self-help book or a crisis resource. It isn't either. Stokes is a literary writer first, and the book reads like one — dense paragraphs, sharp dialogue, digressions into theater theory and family history that only tangentially relate to the main arc. If you pick it up expecting straightforward advice on surviving depression, you'll be frustrated. It's closer to a literary memoir that happens to sit squarely in the depression-and-recovery genre. The difference matters. I keep coming back to one passage where Stokes describes sitting in a hospital room after his most recent attempt, watching the fluorescent lights flicker, and feeling nothing at all. Not relief. Not regret. Just emptiness. He writes about it for two pages without melodrama. That restraint is the book's real skill. Most writers would pile on the pathos here. He doesn't. The emptiness speaks for itself.