March Madness is over

This is your trigger warning for a reading list equal parts intense, dark and necessary

That's neither legendary film star Marilyn Monroe nor a crazy woman, but rather a lookalike mannequin inside an old pay-telephone booth at the Crazy Woman Realty office in Hulett, Wyoming photgraphed by Carol Highsmith. Library of Congress.

Dear readers,

Just after I published my March reading list, focused on memoirs and fiction about mental illness and psychiatric hospitalization, my daughter came home from school and shared that a classmate, I’ll call him Bo, had been absent for two weeks. When I asked why, she said he was “at a boarding school for kids who want to murder themselves.” 

I asked her what she meant, and she told me the teacher had shared with the class that the child’s mother had found a notebook with his suicide plans. She had gotten him help but he was not able to leave that place to come to school, so she concluded they must be teachi…