What I’d Rather Not Think About Is a Brutal yet Beautiful Portrayal of Grief

As the title suggests, What I’d Rather Not Think About is anything but an easy read. It’s not just the story of losing a twin to suicide but the story of a life inextricably intertwined with this chronically depressed twin. “My brother had gone, and with him, all of my past.” In fact, suicide is woven throughout the book (and the lives of the twins) like the branding on a stick of rock. Popular discussion points between them are the Twin Towers, suicide statistics, and famous suicides like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf.

“Three weeks before his death, he’d already known what he was going to do, that’s twenty-one days of him pretending to involve me in his life. In the letter, he’d written that he loved me and he was sorry. Sorry, he’d written. And he’d given me instructions. Don’t get angry, don’t fret, don’t blame yourself. Don’t feel stupid, I thought. Or lost, betrayed, abandoned.”

What I’d Rather Not Think About

Posthuma’s writing, while emotional, remains spare and sparse. This subtlety and gentleness help the narrator and reader deal with what must be scarcely manageable grief. Told through disparate vignettes, the book is fragmentary in style, reflective of the messiness of human memory. The book reads almost like a collage of the disparate elements that make up a life.

We flit between watching reruns of Survivor and dealing with the darkest impulses of depression. “My brother’s life was a series of poor Survivor decisions, but the stupidest thing he did was break his alliance with the only other contestant he could trust, the one who would have given him her last grains of rice, who would have carried him on her back to the finish line if it came to that.”

The question of how to live is at the centre of the novel. We see the coping strategies and compulsions necessary to deal with being alive – in our narrator’s case, a sweater collection. “By my twenty-seventh birthday, I owned 142 sweaters, and it was high time I saw a therapist.” The twins’ parents are similarly obsessed with “looking at the ground,” or collecting fossils.

The almost comedic element of anxiety is exposed. “I was able to check the metro without checking everywhere for bombs, but I did break into a sweat whenever I ran into a vague acquaintance at the supermarket.” Posthuma looks at the irrationality and bizarre nature of being alive with a light touch. “She’s still alive, he’s still alive,” I thought every time someone walked by. “She didn’t throw herself in front of a train. Everyone who’s still alive clearly thinks life is worth living.”

What I’d Rather Not Think About also takes a brutal look at whether or not we can ever truly know someone. “I quickly understood exactly how seahorses mated, but I still didn’t understand what my brother wanted out of life.” This inherent distance between ourselves and others is one of the harshest realities of the human condition – and is brought into intense focus after our narrator finds herself unable to save her twin brother. “I explained how you could hold onto a moment. But you can’t use it to hold onto people,” I said, “because they can always just get up and walk out of view.”

Jente Posthuma

Posthuma muses on the meaning of life and death without ever wandering into the territory of didacticism. She seeks comfort in nihilism, attempting to see the meaninglessness of everything. “One of the puppets had recently lost her brother, but that brother had also been just a puppet on a bike.” She also manages to find comfort in the darkness of the worst that has already happened. “One advantage of loss is that you can put it behind you. You’ve lost, so you can relax and breathe again.” In grief, at least she can enjoy the absence of anxiety.

What I’d Rather Not Think About is undeniably bleak, yet it retains a wry humour. It’s certainly taboo and should be approached with appropriate trigger warnings in mind – but though we’d rather not think about these things, the book poses the question: what is the alternative? Perhaps it’s these things we don’t want to look directly at are the most important to tackle head-on. “My mother says we should see it as a natural phenomenon, like a storm that surges, then dies down again. This would make it easier for us to accept it, along with the devastation left in its wake.”