Product Description

As a thirty-five-year-old woman, C. Comfort Shields is haunted by the memory of her first true love's devastating suicide eighteen months after she met him at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. While searching for answers about Ben's death and her place in his life, she also begins her own personal journey of self-discovery.This symphonic memoir of life and death, love and anger, and guilt and forgiveness sways back and forth-in an extraordinarily candid narrative-from the love story of a nineteen-year-old to her reflections years later. She shares her insights into the survivor's complex as she learns to live, love, and trust again. As a mother, wife, and teacher, she realizes the profound influence she has in the lives of others but also knows that she cannot guarantee their future, as she could not control Ben's.Intimate and frank, Surviving Ben's Suicide follows Shields's passage through the stages of grief. Her story symbolizes how memories of the past and new life experiences are interwoven. The reality of surviving Ben's suicide was not glamorous, but she grew as a person and came out on the other side with a deeply satisfying life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1337006 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 258 pages

About the Author
C. Comfort Shields earned degrees from Oxford University and Sarah Lawrence College. The author of two children's books published by Penguin Putnam, she has worked in publishing in New York City and taught in Connecticut. Shields now lives in Fairfield County, Connecticut with her family. Visit her online at www.comfortshields.com.

Customer Reviews

Watch this Writer--Haunting and Beautiful Prose

After finishing this extraordinary book, I went back and read in C. Comfort Shields' acknowledgments that she thanks several authors with whom she has studied, including the British poet, Jamie McKendrick. And I know from reading her memoir, that she did her graduate work at Oxford in social anthropology. This immediately tied everything together for me, because what sets this book apart is not only its profundity, but also the beauty of the writing, which approaches poetry in certain passages. The prose is economical, which further adds to this. As most of us know, it is far harder to write something so powerful with fewer words than with more.

What moved me most about Shields' book was the unique structure, which reminded me of A River Runs Through It. In fact, revisiting my copy of A River Runs Through It, I was struck that some of the text in that book could also speak to Shields' story:

"So it is...that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed." "It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."

The symbolism of memories through prose that interweaves through time works masterfully in Surviving Ben's Suicide. And the insights that Shields shares with us so gently, yet expertly--of being able to trust others again, only after releasing the pursuit of control over others and learning to trust and forgive oneself--are profound. These are insights that relate to us all.

Deeply moving
When she was in college, Comfort Shields met another student named Ben, a man who'd been in the navy and only returned to school at age 24. They began a relationship and fell in love. Eighteen months later, Ben killed himself. This memoir details their relationship alongside Comfort's struggle to survive herself, to grow and learn from the experience, and forgive herself, with which she still struggles.

I wasn't sure I was going to like this book when I heard about it. My brother passed away when I was nineteen, and I avoid the subject of death far more than the average person my age. It's still too close to me. I took a chance, and I'm glad I did. Comfort's struggle is oddly empowering for her and for the reader, whom she has chosen to allow into her world. This beautiful memoir succeeds as both a story of her grief and her recovery and as a tribute to Ben, who struggled so much himself. Shields writes well and clearly, telling us her story in a way that makes her sympathetic while making it clear that she doesn't expect any. Despite the difficult subject, the book isn't hard at all to read and is in fact engrossing. Her struggle and the situation is clearly sad, but it is focused on the positive, not the negative. It is a book full of hope and memories.

The reader watches as the relationship between Ben and Comfort is strained by his mental illness, even though they so obviously love each other and she tries so hard to keep them together. The parts when they were falling in love were extremely touching, knowing the outcome of the relationship, experiencing this dual journey.

I found the most poignant and important lesson that Comfort learned is that she could not control the life of anyone else. She could not have saved Ben; it was out of her hands and she did the best she could. She discovers this over and over again throughout the course of her life, and not only is it true for her, it's true for us all. Her journey is inspiring and I can imagine it giving hope and help to not only people whose loved ones have killed themselves, but to anyone who has lost someone and does not know where to go next.

A beautifully written, unusually honest and highly intellectual memoir
I have spent the last five years looking for a memoir written by someone who had survived his or her partner's suicide, and when I found SURVIVING BEN'S SUICIDE by C. Comfort Shields I felt a huge relief. At last, someone had broken through the silence and shared a highly intelligent, intellectual, sobering, eloquent, and at times even witty reflection on what it feels like to survive a lover's suicide.

Comfort Shields writes with honesty and raw feeling about her passionate love affair with Ben, a fellow college student at Sarah Lawrence College. Their relationship became complex, as she became more and more aware of Ben's mental illness (he was diagnosed as bi-polar at one stage and borderline later), which culminated in his taking his own life by driving from Washington D.C. to Maine and shooting himself in the head. This act devastated the author, and it took her fifteen years to fully tell the story of the remarkable journey of learning to love and trust herself and others again. She went on to get a graduate degree from Oxford University. She married and had children. Surviving her college love's suicide permeated all of the milestones in here life and who she became. For her, the past and the present were inseparable. Part of the strength of the book is the interweaving of past and present, which Shields pulls off beautifully. I read SURVIVING BEN'S SUICIDE in the course of one day, because it was impossible to put down. By the end of the story, I felt as though I had actually taken the author's journey with her and I am wiser after that experience.