Blown Away by Richard Boothby
Blown Away is a deeply human portrait of Boothby’s struggle to survive, process, and eventually, come to terms with the worst suffering a parent can experience—the loss of a child. One fateful night, Boothby received a call informing him that, after a prolonged battle with drug dependency, his twenty-three-year-old son Oliver had taken his own life. Blown Away chronicles Boothby’s resulting search for meaning in the face of his devastating grief, and offers valuable tools for those looking to make sense of their own suffering. Keep reading to find out more about this book.
Blown Away by Richard Boothby
After he learned that his son had shot himself, Boothby was plunged into a desperate hunt for clarity: why had this happened, and what could have been done to prevent it? As a philosophy professor and an expert on the overlap of psychoanalytic theory and contemporary philosophy, he was no stranger to the human psyche. He turned to psychology—including talk therapy and a research study on the psychedelic psilocybin—for answers, an understanding of his son’s experience, and how to regain his own appreciation for life.
In this meditation on love and mourning, Boothby shares his own intimate journey, grappling with the havoc that dual epidemics of substance abuse and gun violence wreaked on his own family’s life. Blown Away offers a poignant account of sorrow and healing, revealing how the death of a loved one can in some ways bring us closer to them and to ourselves.
You can find Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son’s Suicide on Amazon .
About the Author
Richard Boothby is a Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of Sex on the Couch: What Freud Still Has to Teach Us About Sex and Gender, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud, and Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan.