These books speak to every survivor of suicide loss, whatever your relationship to the person you lost. Some of them are practical guides organized around the first days, weeks, and months of this grief.
Some are memoirs from survivors who put their experience on the page because they believed it would help someone else.
Some were written by clinicians and researchers who have spent careers studying this particular form of bereavement.
What they all share is an understanding that losing someone to suicide is different from other losses in ways that matter, and that you deserve resources that take that seriously.
You will find the same few titles recommended again and again across every list of suicide loss resources. There is a reason for that. Some books earn their reputation. This page is honest about which ones belong in that category and why, and it also points you toward some newer titles that have been finding their way into survivors’ hands in recent years. If you don’t know where to start, start here.
Books For All Suicide Loss Survivors
After Suicide Loss: Coping with Your Grief
Author: Jack Jordan, Ph.D. and Bob Baugher, Ph.D.
ISBN-13: 978-0983950592
If I am recommending only one book to someone who has just lost someone to suicide, this is usually the one I reach for. Jack Jordan and Bob Baugher are both researchers and clinicians who have worked specifically with suicide loss survivors for decades, and their book is organized around the actual shape of early grief: the first days, the first weeks, the first months. It covers the psychiatric conditions that often emerge after this kind of loss in plain language, tells you when it makes sense to seek professional help, and includes a chapter on helping children cope with a suicide death. This is not a book that promises you answers. It is a book that tells you what to expect and what to do with what is happening to you, and in the early days of this grief, that is exactly what you need.
AFSP Highly Recommended
My Son My Son: A Guide to Healing After Death, Loss, or Suicide
Author: Iris Bolton with Curtis Mitchell
ISBN-13: 978-1879651005
Iris Bolton lost her son Mack to suicide in 1977, when she was herself a therapist who thought she understood grief, and she has said that nothing in her training prepared her for what happened when she became a survivor herself. Over forty years later this book is still the one I most often see dog-eared and underlined in the hands of group members who have found their way through the early months, because Iris is not writing from a clinical distance but from inside the grief, at a time when she was still figuring out how to survive it. The honesty of that comes through on every page, and it remains one of the most trustworthy companions ever produced.
It was the first book I read, and it still sits on my desk.
No Time to Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One
Author: Carla Fine
ISBN-13: 978-0385485517
Carla Fine’s husband Harry was a physician who died by suicide in 1989, and she spent years afterward interviewing other survivors and weaving their voices into this book alongside her own, which means that reading it has something of the quality of being in a support group: you hear your own experience reflected back to you from a dozen different angles. She does not soften the hard parts or skip over the grief in a hurry to get to healing, and she manages to move toward something like hope without making it feel premature or unearned.
The Gift of Second: Healing from the Impact of Suicide
Author: Brandy Lidbeck
ISBN-13: 978-0998074702
Brandy Lidbeck is both a therapist and a suicide loss survivor, and this book combines both perspectives in a way that feels genuinely useful rather than prescriptive, addressing the guilt and shame that survivors carry and charting a path toward healing that is realistic about how long and non-linear that path is. She does not avoid the hard parts (the intrusive thoughts, the anger, the moments when healing feels like betrayal) and the AFSP Loss and Healing Council recommends it for both newly bereaved survivors and those further along in their grief because it works equally well in the first year and years later.
AFSP Recommended
Understanding Your Suicide Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones
Author: Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.
ISBN-13: 978-1617223358
Alan Wolfelt brings his Touchstones framework specifically to suicide loss, and the ten touchstones are not stages or a checklist but landmarks: ways of orienting yourself in a grief that has no predictable map. He is honest throughout about the ways suicide grief differs from other bereavement (the stigma, the unanswerable “why,” the guilt that turns inward) and the book is structured in short sections that are accessible even when sustained reading is difficult. The companion journal, “The Understanding Your Suicide Grief Journal,” is worth having alongside it if you find writing useful.
The Wilderness of Suicide Grief: Finding Your Way
Author: Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.
ISBN-13: 978-1879651364
Where “Understanding Your Suicide Grief” is structured and methodical, this book uses the image of wilderness: a vast, disorienting landscape with no clear path through, where the only way out is to keep walking and trust that the path will become visible as you go. Wolfelt sits with you in that wilderness for a while, naming what you are likely to find there (the guilt, the self-recrimination, the relentless questioning) and then, without pretending the walk is short or easy, points you forward. For some survivors, this metaphor captures early grief better than any framework does.
Touched by Suicide: Hope and Healing After Loss
Author: Michael F. Myers, M.D. and Carla Fine
ISBN-13: 978-1592402281
This collaboration between psychiatrist Michael Myers and suicide loss survivor Carla Fine brings both clinical expertise and personal testimony to the full range of experiences that follow suicide loss, covering the mental health conditions that can emerge after this kind of grief, when and how to seek professional help, and the longer arc of recovery beyond the first year. Myers covers what the conditions look like clinically; Fine covers what they feel like from the inside. If you want both the emotional validation and the clinical information, this book delivers both.
Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide
Author: Christopher Lukas and Henry M. Seiden, Ph.D.
ISBN-13: 978-1843108474
Christopher Lukas grew up in a family marked by suicide, lost his mother as a child, and lost his brother Tony (a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner) to suicide decades later, and this book written with psychologist Henry Seiden is an account of what it means to live with suicide loss across an entire life and across generations. Its central argument is that speaking about it is essential to healing: not because speaking makes the grief smaller, but because silence makes it metastasize. One of the few books that addresses the long-term weight of carrying this loss over time.
Finding Peace Without All the Pieces: After a Loved One’s Suicide
Author: LaRita Archibald
ISBN: 978-0615611860
LaRita Archibald lost her son to suicide and went on to found SPAN, the Suicide Prevention Advocacy Network, and her title captures something essential about this grief: you will not find all the pieces. The question that matters is whether you can find something like peace anyway, and Archibald argues that you can, writing with the authority of someone who has been there and has spent decades sitting with others who have been there too. This is a book that survivors return to at different points in their grief and find different things in it each time.
The Second Year: A Grief Guide for Suicide Loss Survivors
Author: Bibi Nowak
ISBN: 979-8253608791
Most grief books address the first year, but this one addresses the second, which matters because for a lot of survivors the second year is harder: the shock wears off, the attention from others fades, and the full weight of the loss arrives in a way it couldn’t before. Bibi Nowak covers the secondary losses that accumulate (the friendships that shifted, the identity that changed, the future that had to be rebuilt) without offering shortcuts or false comfort. Research backs up the premise: grief after suicide often deepens in the second year rather than diminishing.
A Special Scar: The Experience of People Bereaved by Suicide
Author: Alison Wertheimer
ISBN-13: 978-0415220279
Alison Wertheimer lost her sister to suicide and spent years afterward interviewing fifty survivors, whose honest accounts of what they faced (the stigma, the guilt, the anger, and the complicated process of rebuilding a life) form this book. What makes it valuable is the breadth: fifty accounts together begin to capture the full range of the experience in a way no single memoir can. Reading it, most survivors find themselves in at least several of the stories, and the relief of recognition is real and lasting.
Additional Books For All Survivors
Healing the Hurt Spirit: Daily Affirmations for People Who Have Lost a Loved One to Suicide
Author: Catherine Greenleaf
ISBN: 978-0977824403
Catherine Greenleaf is a survivor of multiple suicide losses, and this book reflects that long experience of living with this kind of grief across years and seasons. It is organized as a daily reader from January 1 through December 31, with a short reading and healing affirmation for each day, each one addressing something specific to the suicide loss experience: the guilt, the unanswered questions, the anniversary dates, the social isolation, and the slow return of meaning. The format makes it particularly useful for survivors who cannot read in sustained stretches in the early months, and for those who find small daily doses of connection more sustainable than sitting with a full-length book.
Alliance of Hope recommends it for survivors at any stage of their journey, not just the newly bereaved, because the material holds up and finds new meaning as the grief changes over time.
Dying to Be Free: A Healing Guide for Families After a Suicide
Author: Beverly Cobain and Jean Larch
ISBN-13: 978-1592853298
Beverly Cobain is a cousin of Kurt Cobain and a crisis intervention specialist who has worked in suicide loss support for decades. Jean Larch is a social worker and bereavement counselor. Together they bring both personal understanding and professional expertise to this guide for families in the immediate aftermath and beyond, and the result is one of the more direct and useful books in this space. What distinguishes it is its willingness to name the shame and stigma surrounding suicide as one of the things that most prevents survivors from getting the help they need. Cobain writes from her own experience of losing a family member in the public glare of a celebrity death, which gives the book an authenticity about stigma that more clinical guides sometimes lack. The personal stories woven throughout from other survivors make it read less like a self-help guide and more like a community, which is often exactly what early grief needs.
Recommended across multiple survivor organizations.
Healing After the Suicide of a Loved One
Author: Ann Smolin, CSW and John Guinan, Ph.D.
ISBN-13: 978-0671796600
Ann Smolin and John Guinan wrote this book with a specific awareness that different relationships produce different grief, and they organized it accordingly: separate chapters for parents, spouses, siblings, and children, each addressing the particular emotional terrain of that relationship after a suicide death. That structure makes it one of the most practically useful books for families in which multiple members are grieving the same loss from very different positions, because you can read the chapter that speaks to you without having to extract yourself from material aimed at someone else’s experience. The case studies throughout are drawn from real clinical work, and they give the book the texture of something grounded in actual human experience rather than theory. Despite its age, the book has remained in use by grief counselors for decades because the emotional reality it describes has not changed.
Suicide Survivors’ Handbook (Expanded Edition)
Author: Trudy Carlson
ISBN: 978-0964244382
Trudy Carlson organized this book around the questions that survivors most consistently bring to the early months of their grief: Why? What about the shame and the guilt? How long does the pain last? What actually helps? How do you deal with the people around you who don’t know what to say? She draws throughout on practical advice from other survivors rather than clinical theory, which gives the book a peer quality that early bereaved readers often respond to more readily than they respond to professional guidance.
AFSP has recommended it specifically for its straightforward, practical orientation, and it earns that recommendation by meeting survivors where they are rather than where the clinical literature thinks they should be.
Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World
Author: Elizabeth Harper Neeld ISBN-13: 978-0446690508
Elizabeth Harper Neeld is both a grief researcher and a suicide loss survivor, and this book, which has been in print across multiple editions since the 1980s, has become one of the foundational texts in the grief literature. The American Red Cross chose it to distribute to volunteers working with families after the 9/11 attacks, and it has been the subject of two Public Television documentaries and a Psychology Today Book of the Month. The seven choices Neeld describes are not stages and not a checklist but active decisions that present themselves at different points in grief, each one an opportunity to move toward healing or away from it.
Alliance of Hope references it regularly in their resources, and survivors who have read it often describe it as one of the books that gave them the clearest framework for understanding what was happening to them and what they could do about it.
I’ll Write Your Name on Every Beach
Author: Susan Auerbach
ISBN-13: 978-1629799261
Susan Auerbach lost her 21-year-old son Noah to suicide in 2013, and this memoir, which AFSP’s Loss and Healing Council highly recommends, traces her grief through the lens of the survivor community she found in the years after his death. What distinguishes it from other suicide loss memoirs is the way it is organized around the themes and issues that survivors actually encounter rather than around a simple chronological account of grief. Dr. Jack Jordan, one of the foremost authorities on suicide loss bereavement, describes it as “helpfully organized around themes and issues that suicide loss survivors will likely encounter,” which is a precise and earned description. The title refers to a ritual Auerbach developed for honoring Noah at beaches, a detail that speaks to the book’s central argument: that meaning-making is possible even when answers are not, and that the survivor community is one of the places where that meaning gets made.
Aftermath: Picking Up the Pieces After a Suicide
Author: Gary Roe
ISBN-13: 978-1950382262
Gary Roe is a grief counselor and the author of several grief guides, several of which are recommended by Alliance of Hope. This book addresses the immediate aftermath of suicide loss: the practical, emotional, and relational upheaval of the first weeks and months when everything feels impossible at once. Roe writes in a direct, warm voice that does not condescend and does not minimize, and the book is short enough to be read in the acute phase of grief when longer books are inaccessible. For survivors who need something they can actually get through in the first days after a loss, this is a book that meets them at that moment without pretending the moment is anything other than what it is.
Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss
Author: Eileen Vorbach Collins
ISBN-13: 978-1627204910
When Eileen Vorbach Collins lost her 15-year-old daughter Lydia to suicide, she found her way toward healing partly through community and partly through writing, and this book is the result of both. It is a collection of linked narrative essays that weave together suicide loss, Jewish faith and identity, interfaith marriage, and mental illness across generations, and it is one of the more honest accounts available of what the long arc of grief actually looks like: not the first year, not the first crisis, but the years beyond that when grief becomes part of the texture of an ordinary life. Alliance of Hope has featured Collins as a contributing author, and what she brings to this space is a literary sensibility alongside a survivor’s hard-won understanding. For readers who find their way into grief through story rather than through self-help frameworks, this book is a companion worth having.
Rocky Roads: The Journeys of Families Through Suicide Grief
Author: Michelle Linn-Gust, Ph.D.
ISBN-13: 978-0972331814
Michelle Linn-Gust, who also wrote “Do They Have Bad Days in Heaven?” (the foundational sibling loss book), turns here to the family as a whole system navigating the aftermath of a suicide death. The book explores how families navigate their grief together when each member is grieving differently: the way one parent’s grief looks nothing like the other’s, the way siblings can feel invisible in the shadow of their parents’ devastation, the way the family system reorganizes itself around an absence and has to find a new way to function. It is frequently used in family therapy contexts and in suicide loss support groups that welcome multiple family members together, because it gives each person in the room a language for their own experience without requiring them to subsume it into a single shared narrative.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Where should I start if I have no idea what I need right now?
Start with Jack Jordan and Bob Baugher’s “After Suicide Loss: Coping with Your Grief.” I have been making this recommendation for fifteen years and I have not found a better one for someone who is in the early days and does not know what they are looking for. It is organized around the shape of early grief, it does not promise things it cannot deliver, and it tells you what to expect in plain language. If you are not ready for a full book yet, Gary Roe’s “Aftermath” is short enough to finish in an afternoon and still does real work. - Are there books for specific relationships, like for a parent or a spouse or a sibling?
A few, yes. Ann Smolin and John Guinan’s “Healing After the Suicide of a Loved One” has separate chapters organized by relationship, which is one of the things that makes it particularly useful for families where more than one person is grieving. If you lost a sibling specifically, Michelle Linn-Gust has written “Do They Have Bad Days in Heaven?” which is the book most often recommended for sibling loss after suicide and which deserves its own page here, coming soon. - What if I cannot read right now? I pick up a book and put it down.
That is not unusual in early grief, and it does not mean you are doing something wrong. Two options that tend to work when sustained reading is not possible: Catherine Greenleaf’s “Healing the Hurt Spirit,” which is structured as a daily reader with one short entry per day, and Gary Roe’s “Aftermath,” which is short and built for exactly the moment you are in. Some survivors find audio versions easier in the early months. Whatever gets something into your hands is the right choice. - Do these books still apply if my loss happened years ago?
Most of them, yes. Grief after suicide does not follow the schedule that people around you expect, and a book that lands in your hands in year three or year seven is not arriving too late. A few books on this page address the longer arc specifically: Elizabeth Harper Neeld’s “Seven Choices,” Alan Wolfelt’s “Understanding Your Suicide Grief,” and Bibi Nowak’s “The Second Year” are all useful beyond the early months. Eileen Vorbach Collins’ “Love in the Archives” is one of the most honest accounts available of what grief looks like years down the road, when it has become part of the texture of ordinary life rather than a crisis. - Are these books appropriate for someone supporting a survivor, not a survivor themselves?
Some of them, with the right expectations. Reading about what a survivor is actually experiencing is one of the most useful things a supporter can do, because it builds a realistic picture of what this grief looks and feels like from the inside rather than from the outside. “Touched by Suicide” by Michael Myers and Carla Fine and “A Special Scar” by Alison Wertheimer both give a full picture of survivor experience in ways that would be genuinely useful for someone trying to understand what someone they care about is going through. If you are supporting a survivor, I also have a post on this site specifically about how to do that without making it worse.
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