Death
While his last book, Big Trouble, was undergoing final revisions in 1997, Lukas committed suicide by hanging himself with a bathrobe sash. He had been diagnosed with depression about ten years earlier. In an interview that followed the publication of Common Ground he gave some hints about his impending suicide, linking it with his career as a writer. "All writers ...," he said, "are, to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves. In my own case, I was filling a hole in my life which opened at the age of eight, when my mother killed herself, throwing our family into utter disarray. My father quickly developed tuberculosis—psychosomatically triggered, the doctors thought—forcing him to seek treatment in an Arizona sanatorium. We sold our house and my brother and I were shipped off to boarding school. Effectively, from the age of eight, I had no family, and certainly no community. That's one reason the book worked: I wasn't just writing a book about busing. I was filling a hole in myself".
Read more about this topic: J. Anthony Lukas
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