“I have had nothing bad happen to me except my own doing. I have let this cowardice envelop me, and I can’t shake it off. I will commit the worst thing you can ever do to someone who loves you: killing yourself. The scary thing is, I’m okay with that.” —Victoria McLeod, Laptop journal, March 30, 2014. Loss Adjustment is a mother’s recount of her 17-year-old daughter’s suicide. In the wake of Victoria McLeod’s passing, she left behind a remarkable journal in her laptop of the final four months of her life. Linda Collins, her mother, has woven these into her memoir, which is at once cohesive, yet fragmented, reflecting a survivor's state of mind after devastating loss. Loss Adjustment involves the endless whys, the journey of Linda Collins and her husband in honouring Victoria, and the impossible question of what drove their daughter to this irretrievable act. A stunningly intimate portrait of loss and grief, Loss Adjustment is a breaking of silence—a book whose face society cannot turn away from.
Author
Linda Collins has a new book out (April, 2021), a poetry collection called Sign Language for the Death of Reason, edited by Lambda shortlister Tania De Rozario. It is published by Math Paper Press who sell it through their online bookstore @booksactually. In New Zealand, the distributor is bayhillbooks.co.nz. Linda is doing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She already has one MA in Creative Writing, during which she wrote her best-selling memoir, Loss Adjustment. That MA was with the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) at Victoria University, New Zealand, 2017. Her creative non-fiction, essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in Turbine, Swamp Living, The Fib Review, The Cordite Poetry Review, Oyster River Pages, Literary Mama, Fan the Flames (UEA Eggbox zine), and The Freerange Journal. She was shortlisted for the Hachette Australia Trans-Tasman mentorship, longlisted for a NZ flash fiction award and received an Honourable Mention in a Glimmer Train contest. Loss Adjustment was written three years after her daughter had died, and is a work of creative non-fiction. In fiction, she has short stories in A View of Stars: Stories of Love (Marshall-Cavdendish) and Call and Response 2 (Math Paper Press).
