This paper counters the understanding of suicide as a solitary act by tracing how it ripples out through a diverse range of bodies, institutions, and objects, conceiving of it as relational in the ways that its dispersion connects lives, which are otherwise unrelated. Anne reads Orlando von Einsiedel’s 2018 documentary Evelyn as enacting a version of ‘promiscuous care’ (The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 2020), generating community and solidarity around suicide by harnessing the potential of the local and the relational.
Anne Whitehead is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature in the School of English at Newcastle University UK. She has recently published the monograph Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Perspective (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), which is one of the first publications in the Critical interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities series. Anne authored the monograph Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and was a co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). She sits on the advisory board of the Edinburgh University Press monograph series Contemporary Cultural Studies of Illness, Health and Medicine.