Content warning: Suicide
The poet John Berryman’s chance to have a quiet, uneventful life ended early one morning in 1926 when he was 11. It ended when his father walked into the backyard with a gun and committed suicide. John was in his bedroom when it happened. The bedroom’s windows faced the backyard.
It wasn’t the only upheaval in his childhood, and it was far from the only traumatic event that would happen to him, but that morning probably goes a long way in explaining the addiction to alcohol he struggled with his entire adult life…