When a state trooper appeared at Rachel Zimmerman’s door to report that her husband had jumped to his death off a nearby bridge, she fell to her knees, unable to fully absorb the news. How could the man she’d married, a devoted father and robotics professor at MIT, have committed such a violent act? How would she explain this to her young daughters? And could she have stopped him?
A longtime journalist, she probed obsessively, believing answers would help her survive. She interviewed doctors, suicide researchers, and a man who jumped off the same bridge and lived.
Us, After examines domestic devastation and resurgence, digging into the struggle between public and private selves, life’s shifting perspectives, the work of motherhood, and the secrets we keep. In this memoir, Zimmerman confronts the unimaginable and discovers the good in what remains.
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“This poignant, soul-baring memoir is truly one of the most moving accounts of grief, loss and resilience that I’ve read. While Rachel Zimmerman speaks frankly about the lasting pain of suicide, this beautifully-written book is ultimately a hopeful family love story, one that shows us how grief and happiness can co-exist.”
Early Praise for Us, After
“I emerged wiser about life, love, pain and resilience from this raw, honest and completely engaging memoir. It is a true gift to us all in the best way—you can’t put it down, and you emerge from it having gained a little bit more understanding of this incredibly beautiful and yet inescapably painful journey that we call life.”
“Us, After is a brilliant and moving memoir about suicide and its impact, a topic that is widely misunderstood. The utter transparency with which Rachel Zimmerman reflects on the death of her husband and the father of their two daughters is stunning. She honors the family they built together, their love story, and his life while also struggling with—anger, confusion, exhaustion, and the grief she and her daughters experience. I am in awe of the ways in which she unflinchingly writes about all sides of our humanity including the impact of love, loss, devastation and healing in this beautiful memoir. A must-read.”
“Us, After is an unforgettable read. Rachel Zimmerman illuminates the impact of an unthinkable loss with remarkable grace, honesty and wit. She somehow manages to combine vulnerability with a reporter’s dogged curiosity all the while keeping the pages turning. Zimmerman cuts through personal tragedy and leaves you with something that we find too rarely in nonfiction today: hope.”
“This is an amazing story of love, pain, tragedy, and ultimately resilience and hope. Zimmerman writes with searing honesty, capturing the full, messy humanity of all the characters, including herself. She tells it as it is, and as it was with an openness that invites us all to talk more openly about the stigmatized topic of suicide. She also shows us it is possible to move forward in the face of unimaginable loss, and how suffering and joy can coexist.”
“Masterfully written and compelling in its substance and scope. I stayed up all night reading it…this book is a marvelous feat. Page after page, I kept thinking, ‘How did she do this?’ This being mothering, surviving, chronicling, and asking hard questions of everyone, including herself.”
“Us, After is one of the best memoirs I have read in a very long time. It is poetic and lyrical, unflinching. and a testament to the strength of the human soul in dealing with unimaginable tragedy. We bleed for Zimmerman and her two daughters. We laugh and cry with them. And ultimately we marvel at their strength and resilience.”
“Us, After wrestles vigorously and revealingly with the act of weaving of life into narrative. Zimmerman embraces the knots and webs inherent in this process—the ways in which our own stories are inextricably intertwined with those of our parents, our kids, our partners and friends and turns these tangles into art. (I couldn’t help but think of the recurring questions Lin-Manuel Miranda posed in Hamilton: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”) Like the best in its genre, this memoir manages to richly evoke the specifics of its narrator’s experience, while proving profoundly relatable. Indeed, we all experience turning point moments when our lives lose their through-line. Moments when the destabilizing shock of the unexpected exposes the masquerade of coherence that we all depend on the linear flow of chronological time, the structuring force of our mundane daily rhythms, the seeming continuity of living in our dynamic bodies. Zimmerman has journeyed well beyond the safe shores of coherence and this memoir weaves together the threads she has collected on her return voyage. Her arrival, at a transformed shore, provides a vital testament to the power of love for meaning-making, and ultimately for survival.”
“More than ever, we need a more authentic, more honest discourse about mental health in this country, and Rachel Zimmerman’s bracing memoir about her husband’s suicide is an important contribution. Her unflinching prose, searing in its emotional intensity, bears witness to an incomprehensible loss, a confrontation with grief that stirs us—and brings into the open a critical conversation we all can learn from.”
“Beautifully written, honest, funny…It shows without telling what resilience is.”