What do you think?
Rate this book
Blue Genes: A Memoir of Loss and Survival
Christopher (Kit) Lukas’s mother committed suicide when he was a boy. He and his brother, Tony, were not told how she died. No one spoke of the family’s history of depression and bipolar disorder. The brothers grew up to achieve remarkable success; Tony as a gifted journalist (and author of the classic book, Common Ground), Kit as an accomplished television producer and director. After suffering bouts of depression, Kit was able to confront his family’s troubled past, but Tony never seemed to find the contentment Kit had attained–he killed himself in 1997. Written with heartrending honesty, Blue Genes captures the devastation of this family legacy of depression and details the strength and hope that can provide a way of escaping its grasp.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
246 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
February 18, 2009
Home sick from work and I read this book today. It's really good, very sad, very articulate. Lukas begins the books with an early scene between his brother and himself when they were very young--4 and 6, I think, then goes to being told his brother killed himself. Next he takes us on a journey through his family history--his grandparents, his parents, especially his mother's early life, his parent's marriage, his brother's birth, his own, her suicide and them growing up without a mother, and all they went through. Next he chronicles the relationship he had with Tony as adults. Christoper worked in television and Tony was a journalist and author who won two Pulitzer Prizes. The book is about their relationship and also about the legacy of depression, bi-polar depression, and suicide--his grandmother, mother, uncle, aunt, brother, and his dad drank himself to death--in the Lukas family and in all families. Very informative, yet very personal.
October 20, 2008
My kind of book. I wish it were longer and even more in depth. The pain that comes from a legacy of not talking about mental illness.
July 15, 2016
I'm not sure if there really are memoir "spoilers," but I'm going to talk about the whole book, so I put the warning on, just in case :)
"This is a story of two brothers in a particular family at a particular time in the history of that family. If the tale often appears to be as much about my parents and grandparents–and my emotions, my life, and my memories–as it is about my brother, it is because it is very much a story about relationships...Beyond that, it is also a book about coming to terms with the suicide of a brother — an event I had written about previously when it happened to other people, but never before experienced for myself."
This excerpt comes early in Lukas’s memoir and give you a clear sense of what to expect. This is a very different memoir from any other I’ve read so far, in my mental-health-memoir bingeing project. First of all, it is the first one I have read that was written by a man. More significantly, its approach is more journalistic than confessional. It is matter-of-fact, calmly presenting events as they occurred from Lukas’s perspective. When he does step into the territory of conjecture, Lukas is careful to be clear that that’s what he is doing. His final conclusion about other people is generally that he just doesn’t know what was going on in their minds, and that he can’t ever know. The themes of misunderstanding, miscommunication, silence, and repression are woven into Lukas’s understanding of his family’s tragic story.
I have read negative reviews on this site that say Lukas is too unemotional and cold when he describes his life, and that this is a boring and ineffective technique for a memoir. To me, this style of presentation reflects perfectly the character and context of the Lukas family and their story. A weeping, wild confessional a la the young Hornbacher or Wurtzel, or a sharp, wise-cracking Moezzi-style romp would not be appropriate for Lukas and his life. The voice fits the story; I think this is an accomplishment and perhaps one of the hallmarks of successful memoir writing.
Lukas provides a family history going back three generations. He is matter-of-fact in his discussion of mental illness. He does not describe the experiences of depression/mania/etc, but instead provides evidence that these conditions existed in the form of letters, photographs, anecdotes, and conjecture about the silences in between. This is not a book that wants to show you how it feels to be depressed or suicidal; it is a family history working around the central question of why Lukas himself has not followed in the family tradition of committing suicide, and there is a terrifying “yet” hovering quietly over the entire work.
Lukas’s mother commits suicide when he is a small child but it is years before Lukas is finally told that that’s how she died. Lukas’s father is ill-equipped to manage his own grief and raise his two sons; a serious struggle with tuberculosis removes him even further from their lives. Lukas and his brother, Tony, grow up plagued with a sense of abandonment and amorphous shame and guilt regarding the absence of both parents. Despite all of this, both Tony and Lukas go on to have impressive professional lives that are punctuated by overwhelming and debilitating senses of inadequacy and anxiety. Both struggle with clinical depression. Lukas suspects that Tony might have experienced hypomanic episodes as well; he does not share whether or not he himself also leaned towards bipolar disorder, or dealt only with unipolar depression. Tony struggles to develop a personal life, while Lukas finds solace and stability in his wonderful wife and two daughters. Lukas seeks out psychoanalysis; Tony does not receive consistent treatment.
I didn’t mean to write about the brothers’ lives in such a comparative, oppositional way, although I guess that that is one obvious way of thinking about this book, and a line that inevitably, albeit more subtly than I’ve drawn it above, runs through it. Two brothers, both brilliant and successful, both with serious mental health struggles: one dead by suicide, one alive to write about it.
By the end of the memoir the list of the dead runs long: Lukas’s mother Elizabeth , Lukas’s grandmother Missy, Lukas’s father, Lukas’s brother Tony, Lukas’s aunt Frances, Lukas’s uncle Ira, and Lukas’s wife Susan. Out of all of those deaths, only three (Lukas’s father, aunt Frances, and Susan) were not suicides.
Susan, Lukas’s wife, did not die until this book was already on its way to press, from a somewhat unclear heart condition, as Lukas reveals in a gut-wrenching final section, entitled “Envoi." The Envoi section sits in tragic counterpoint to the epigraph, written before Susan’s death: “For Susan, without whom I would not be living."
When I realized this it took my breath away and I had to go online immediately to see if Christopher Lukas was still living; I was terrified that his wife’s death, on top of everything else, might have led him to suicide. Thankfully, as far as the internet can tell me, he is alive. I hope he is close by to his daughters, and that they all are well.
This book resonated deeply with me; I hope this is clear from my review. I highly recommend it if suicide has touched your life in any way (and whose life hasn’t it touched?).
Go hug someone you love.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 8, 2017
So much loss. So much suicide. So much pain. It was enlightening to follow the psychological trail from event to reverberation and consequence. How little we knew about mental illness just a short time ago.
It's a difficult and heavy hearted read, but for those looking for insight or answers, it's worthwhile.
It's a difficult and heavy hearted read, but for those looking for insight or answers, it's worthwhile.
April 7, 2024
A honest and moving depiction of how depression and suicidality run in families. Equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring. The author is incredibly resilient and speaks candidly about the impact of a suicide on those family members left behind.
September 30, 2008
Late one night Christopher (Kit) Lukas received a phone call with news that his brother, the gifted journalist J. Anthony Lukas, had committed suicide. Tragically their mother also committed suicide when they were young boys. Kit and his brother were never told how she died and no one spoke of the family’s history of depression and bipolar disorder. The legacy of guilt and grief haunted Kit and Tony throughout their lives.
Despite both brothers achieving remarkable success, Tony as a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, they suffered bouts of depression. Kit was able to confront his family’s troubled past and find happiness but Tony remained depressed which ultimately led him to take his own life.
Being that this book was a memoir I just couldn’t connect with any of the characters. It may have helped if I was familiar with Tony’s writing or felt some sort of connection to the brothers but the writing just didn’t pull me in. I feel this was more personal for Kit than a story that needed to be shared. I can see where the book might be helpful for anyone who has been affected by a loved one’s suicide but it just didn’t click for me.
Despite both brothers achieving remarkable success, Tony as a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, they suffered bouts of depression. Kit was able to confront his family’s troubled past and find happiness but Tony remained depressed which ultimately led him to take his own life.
Being that this book was a memoir I just couldn’t connect with any of the characters. It may have helped if I was familiar with Tony’s writing or felt some sort of connection to the brothers but the writing just didn’t pull me in. I feel this was more personal for Kit than a story that needed to be shared. I can see where the book might be helpful for anyone who has been affected by a loved one’s suicide but it just didn’t click for me.
October 29, 2013
Christopher (Kit) Lukas’s mother committed suicide when he was a boy. He and his brother, Tony, were not told how she died. No one spoke of the family’s history of depression and bipolar disorder. The brothers grew up to achieve remarkable success; Tony as a gifted journalist (and author of the classic book, Common Ground), Kit as an accomplished television producer and director. After suffering bouts of depression, Kit was able to confront his family’s troubled past, but Tony never seemed to find the contentment Kit had attained–he killed himself in 1997.
A moving memoir about a younger brother's loneliness and desperate attempts to reach his older brother. They were unparented because of untreated bipolar depression and alcoholism and so needed to parent one another. Children rarely do that well as this book shows.
A moving memoir about a younger brother's loneliness and desperate attempts to reach his older brother. They were unparented because of untreated bipolar depression and alcoholism and so needed to parent one another. Children rarely do that well as this book shows.
October 13, 2008
Kind of sad, mother commits suicide & the family only tell Kit & his brother that the mother was sick & died. They only find out about the suicide much later in life. The father is with them on & off, the over-bearing grandmother wants to be there all the time & they never feel like people really want them. The younger brother Kit is the author of this memoir. He always felt abandoned by first his mother then his father & somehow by his older brother whom he always looked up to. The "blue genes" is the familial trait that he feels is resonsible for the suicide of his mother & other family members. I thought it was a sad family.
April 22, 2009
I picked this up from the "new nonfiction" section of the library and thought it looked interesting. The author's family has a history of mental illness and suicide. His mother committed suicide when he was just a child and it had a profound effect on him. The book was interesting and a good reminder of how much childhood experiences affect the psyche of an adult. However, by the end, I got really tired of the constant psycho-analysis by the author; indeed, when I read that he as a psychology major in college, it made a lot of sense. EVERYTHING was put in the frame of psychology and the author's conclusions often seemed a bit off.
August 12, 2009
This is a well-written memoir and very interesting, but it is so sad that I cannot recommend it to anyone. Everyone in the author's family was attractive and successful and they all eventually committed suicide due to depression. To add insult to injury, the author's beloved wife died just before the book was published. Surely there is a lesson to be learned here, but it's too late for the members of his family and I feel like I am now in mourning for people I didn't even know. I just hope the author can break the chain and set a new model for his children to follow.
July 1, 2009
This book was written in a flat, trite manner. I've known more "sane" people who have had much worse experiences than how he "remebers he and his brothers lives. Suicide is HELL and I have empathy for the man but he does not convey much emotion or drama or show the HELL of what living with a mental illness is like. Of course he came from a rich family so his mother was in a "sanitorium". He was spared the gory details! Anyone
February 21, 2010
I loved the Pulitzer Prize winning book COMMON GROUND by Anthony Lukas, and so picked up this book written by his brother, trying to come to terms with Anthony's suicide in mid-life. Turns out there is a lot of suicide in this family and kudos to Christopher Lukas for writing it out - double interesting as a man writing in his 70's who had to grapple with all of this when the era he grew up in didn't have as many options to understand or process his kinds of loss.
April 25, 2011
One of the most unemotional memoirs I have ever read. It's an interesting history of a family, but I have a really hard time comprehending that this was really his life, that it was his mother and brother he's discussing. He says, when finding out about his brother's suicide, "I scream and throw the undropped shoe at the far wall." I cannot fathom that the person who wrote this book actually had that response.
January 2, 2009
A very interesting read for now. Let see how it develops...
Well, i'm a little conflicted abt. the book.Its a memoir abt. "tough childhood" and not having the right diagnosis at the right time.Yes, genes play a role too and thats very evident, but, i think in his case, Family played a great role in the making and breaking of the two brothers.
Well, i'm a little conflicted abt. the book.Its a memoir abt. "tough childhood" and not having the right diagnosis at the right time.Yes, genes play a role too and thats very evident, but, i think in his case, Family played a great role in the making and breaking of the two brothers.
March 28, 2016
being close to someone who's own mother committed suicide when they were young, this book gave me a new perspective on behaviors and reactions I have witnessed. it helped me gain a better understanding and more compassionate view of "why" seemingly benign everyday conversations and discussions have an alternate perception by someone who has suffered such a profound loss.
June 15, 2009
This book was a good, albeit somber read. It details the author's experience dealing with the fallout from depression in his immediate and extended family, and how he has managed to overcome the seeds of suicide that are planted in his genes.
January 6, 2009
This was a very moving and well written book. There is such sadness in the fact that many, many families suffered before the medical community was equipped to diagnose and treat depression and, more specifically, bipolar disorder. I would highly recommend this book.
January 29, 2014
Not for those who don't like depressing material or biography/autobiography type books, but otherwise this is an extremely real and good book about the real lives of a family plagued with mental illness and suicide.
October 2, 2008
You can read my review at Estella's Revenge:
http://estellabooks.blogspot.com/2008...
http://estellabooks.blogspot.com/2008...
Shelved as 'to-think-about'
August 4, 2015Heard of on the Diane Rehm Show
January 22, 2009
An excellent memoir of how the echoes of suicide reverberate through a family for a long time and how no one escapes them.
January 25, 2009
It's an interesting and at times poignant account of the author's struggles to understand his brother's suicide and the family history that drove him to it.
Read
January 29, 2009I had to give up on this one--I couldn't get into it.
March 21, 2009
Wasn't impressed with this story.
May 2, 2009
wow. enormously sad and depressing but a beautiful coming-of-age story that protrays a family's struggles with depression and bipolar disorder. heavy and melancholy, but well worth it.
Want to read
May 6, 2009four stars from a.
July 18, 2010
I would give it a 2.5 if I could. I had a hard time with the wrier's voice/style.
I thought the suicide-related content/info was devastating and incredible. And the "envoi" was heartbreaking.
I thought the suicide-related content/info was devastating and incredible. And the "envoi" was heartbreaking.
June 27, 2014
I met this author and eagerly read his book. It is a good solid brave one but the thesis did not stay with me. It aches forever to lose one or more siblings.
October 29, 2008
Not a happy book but well written.
January 7, 2009
wish i had written this...
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews