Table of Contents

List of Profiled Teens Prologue Introduction 1. Little Girl Lost: Kyra 2. The Fighter: Enoch 3. Overload: Candy 4. The Last Stand: David 5. Homo: Tucker 6. Escaping Death: Gita 7. Shock Jock: Boots 8. Cutter: Jill 9. On the Road: Cody 10. Born-Again Virgin: Gabriella Afterword Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendix 1: Ipe and Brownson Appendix 2: Enoch and His Brother Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author

Terry Williams is a professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research. He specializes in teenage life and culture, drug abuse, crews and gangs, and violence and urban social policy. He is the author of The Con Men: Hustling in New York City (Columbia, 2015); Harlem Supers: The Social Life of a Community in Transition (2015); Crackhouse: Notes from the End of the Line (1993); and The Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story of a Teenage Drug Ring (1989); and is the founder and director of the Harlem Writers Crew Project, a multimedia approach to urban education for center city and rural youths.

Reviews

Always the compassionate listener and masterful ethnographer, Terry Williams courageously takes on teenage suicide, one of the nation's most vexing and tragic subjects. He understands the problem as a father, mentor, teacher, and friend of victims and their families. May the voices of despairing teenagers whom Terry has presented here be heard throughout the nation. -- William Kornblum, Doctoral Program in Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New York Teenage Suicide Notes is a remarkable book that in turns is powerful, poignant, and profoundly disturbing, as it places in focus the fragmented inner lives of young people living in alienated desperation at the very edge of existence, just before they end their lives. Suicide Notes allows us to witness aspects of their struggle, while encouraging our understanding. -- Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street and The Cosmopolitan Canopy, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University Terry Williams makes us understand why young people engage in self-harm. He also tells us about what can be done. And by understanding the self-harm of our young, we also get to know ourselves as adults caught up in contemporary society. All this is brought to us with insight, respect, and dignity, without losing interpretative and critical power. What awaits the reader is the irrevocable need and hope for a dialogue between generations, since the self-harm of the young ultimately is a refusal to cope. -- Mats Trondman, Center for Cultural Sociology at Linnaeus University Terry Williams provides a rare and compassionate account of self-harm and the wish to 'check out' of this world via his compilation of teenage suicide notes obtained through a most mindful application of the ethnographic method. This is vital reading for mental health trainees and professionals, sociologists, policy makers and all in search of a fuller, experience-near, understanding of suicide. -- Howard Steele, New School for Social Research An important, veil-lifting book. Kirkus Reviews When Williams gets out of the way and lets his subjects talk, his central point is vindicated: To care about teens (or anyone), start by listening to what they tell you. -- Peter C. Baker Pacific Standard