Katie was a young college student who hanged herself in her dorm room after years of struggle with family, friendship, romance, body image, and failed aspirations. During her struggles she compiled a 200-page diary in five books.

We meet Katie by way of David Lester’s Katie’s Diary. Lester’s volume first presents Katie’s reading and writing of her own life in searing clarity and, it would seem, as tragic distortion.

The second part of the volume consists of a series of readings of the diary and of Katie by a team of experts:  professors of psychology, clinician, cognitive therapist, social worker, Jungian analyst, and thanologist.  

The “Forward” describes the aim of the volume.

It is the rare document that captures the conflict and complexity of an individual’s stream of consciousness, as it alternately flows, is impeded, and torrentially cascades onward toward an end that can be envisioned confidently only in retrospect.

Katie’s diary charts this dramatic inner course, and it is into this often-turbulent current that Lester and his eight contributors wade into in an effort to understand the forces that give it its tragic momentum.

In the course of their reflective and deep-going analysis, they draw on sociological, feminist, developmental, linguistic, cognitive, psychological, literary, psychiatric, archetypal, spiritual, and psychodynamic perspectives to reveal the dominant internal and external structures and processes with which Katie contends, and in doing so, reveal as much to the reader about the possible utility of these conceptual frameworks as they do about Katie’s ultimate suicide.

The volume — subtitled, Unlocking the Mystery of a Suicide — falls into the sub-genre of suicide literacy called the suicide autopsy. Katie’s Diary has a moral that Katie could not understand in her own life and toward her death. Understanding is made possible by a team of experts engaged in “reflective and deep-going analysis.”

Through analysis, Katie’s life and death are unearthed according to “structures and processes” and “tragic momentum.” Katie was a victim of design and inertia within and all around her. Katie is the moral of the story that she never learned in life.

True clarity requires retrospection as post-mortem and evaluation by way of autopsia, as self-optics (auto optos) as being seen by others since Katie could not truly see herself. Katie is what loomed unto herself, a life we may now read in full view in the light of day.

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David Lester, ed., Katie’s Diary: Unlocking the Mystery of a Suicide (New York: Routledge, 2004).