At 6:30 on the evening of December 21, 1973, Vivienne Loomis walked into her mother's empty silversmithing studio at their home in Melrose, Massachusetts, tied a rope around her neck, and hanged herself. Vivienne was fourteen years and four months old. She was attractive, intelligent, and especially gifted at writing, yet she suffered from so intense and unutterable a despair that she was driven to take her own life. Why?

Vivienne is a loving portrait of a troubled girl, as well as a professionally innovative examination of an alarming and mysterious epidemic: adolescent suicide. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among all Americans aged fifteen to nineteen.

From the extensive material Vivienne Loomis left behind - a long diary and personal journal, a collection of searing poems and school compositions, and several letters to a beloved teacher - clinical psychiatrist John Mack and writing teacher Holly Hickler narrate the final two years of Vivienne's emotional life, using her words as much as possible. They then examine the events of those anguished last months - her personality development, family, school and social relationships - in "an effort to understand the forces that led Vivienne to her decision." Finally, they "consider her death in relation to the increasings national problem of adolescent suicide" and suggest an important new way in which to approach this frightening phenomenon.

According to the authors, this book "is written with the hope that is can be meaningful to anyone close to adolescents: therapists and counselors, teachers whose daily experience must include depressed young people, families struggling with the problem of adolescent suicide. We hope, too, that Vivienne can live again in these pages as the sensitive, remarkable young girl she was."

Vivienne is a book that is heartbreaking yet hopeful, for it offers a rare look inside - and an articulate understanding of - the too-often-secret adolescent world.