"A moving and riveting memoir about one family's love and
tragedy...beautifully researched, and expressed" (Anne Lamott).
Early one Tuesday morning John Brooks went to his teenage daughter's
room. Casey was gone, but she had left a note: The car is parked at the
Golden Gate Bridge. I'm sorry. Within hours a security video showed
Casey stepping off the bridge.
Brooks spent several years after Casey's suicide trying to understand
what led his seventeen-year-old daughter to take her life. He examines
Casey's journey from her abandonment at birth in Poland, to the
orphanage where she lived for her first fourteen months, to her adoption
and life with John and his wife, Erika, in Northern California. He
reads. He talks to Casey's friends, teachers, doctors, therapists, and
other parents. He consults adoption experts, researchers, clinicians,
attachment therapists, and social workers.
In The Girl Behind the Door, Brooks's "desperate search for answers
and guilt for not doing the right thing without knowing what it was
reveals the utter helplessness of suicide survivors" (Kirkus Reviews).
Ultimately, Brooks comes to realize that Casey probably suffered an
attachment disorder from her infancy--an affliction common among
children who've been orphaned, neglected, and abused. She might have
been helped if someone had recognized this. The Girl Behind the Door
is an important book for parents, mental health professionals, and
teens: "Rarely have the subjects of suicide, adoption, adolescence, and
parenting been explored so openly and honestly" (John Bateson, Former
Executive Director, Contra Costa County Crisis Center, and author of
The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge).
