Loss Adjustment

Intimate, honest, beautifully written—a writer's haunting account of the tragic and unexpected suicide of her daughter.

Linda Collins gets up on a Monday morning, dresses for work, makes coffee and goes into her daughter Victoria's bedroom, wondering why she hasn't got up yet. It is an important day for Victoria—the start of the second term of her final year at school and the day she will hear her latest exam results. The bedroom is empty.

So begins every parent's worst nightmare. Collins, a New Zealand journalist, writes with startling candour about her daughter's suicide—the secrets she kept from her parents, the revelations in the personal journals she left behind, and the struggle of Collins and Malcolm McLeod, Victoria's father, to find answers in the midst of enormous grief.

How, they ask themselves, could they have missed the signs? What did the counsellors at Victoria's school know about her state of mind? Did her school friends have any idea how desperate she was? And above all, why would a beautiful, talented, much loved young woman take her own life?

Loss Adjustment is a book for our times, an examination of the tragedy of teenage suicide from a profoundly personal viewpoint.