An eye-opening and intimate portrait of the lonely, sad and nightmarish lives twenty legendary luminaries led. Along with being an historic overview of suicide, Strauss’ book delves into the deaths of our most influential cultural icons: Sylvia Plath, Adolf Hitler, Diane Arbus, Sigmund Freud, Vincent van Gogh, Abbie Hoffman, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Cobain, Spalding Gray, and Anne Sexton, among others.  The deaths are as diverse as the person that killed themselves.  Some are tragic -- Dorothy Dandridge was found naked on her bathroom floor, a handful of anti-depressants swimming in her system. Others are bizarre -- Hunter S. Thompson shot himself while on the phone with his wife in an eerie, copycat tribute to his hero, Ernest Hemingway who killed himself in a similar way forty-four years earlier.  While Strauss explores some of the most talked about and monumental suicides of the past she examines our own morbid fascination, asking why we have become so fixated on these tortured souls. 
 
Lists regarding controversial, bizarre, famous and poorly executed suicides along with unusual facts and statistics are found in this mammoth tome. Written in a creative, descriptive and informative tone, Death Becomes Them is a private, provocative and personal tribute to these lost souls—a fond remembrance and a final goodbye.

“Alix Strauss’ book is dark, grisly – and completely fascinating. I almost felt guilty for so thoroughly enjoying this look at history’s most tormented souls.” – A. J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically
 
“Every life is laid out with such humor, such style and heart, it’s hard to imagine the dead themselves would not be thrilled to come back and read what the author had to say about them. Forget the bible - this is what I want to find in a hotel drawer at four in the morning. A truly unique, compelling and strangely life-affirming work of literary investigation. The perfect book to get you through the night.”   — Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight

Alix Strauss has been a featured lifestyle and trend writer on national morning and talk shows including ABC, CBS, CNN, and most recently, The Today Show. Her articles, which have appeared in the New York Times, New York Post, Time Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Self and Esquire, (among others), cover a range of topics from trends in beauty, travel, and food to celebrity interviews. She is the author of the award winning short story collection, The Joy of Funerals (St. Martin's Press), and the editor of Have I Got a Guy for You (Adams Media), an anthology of mother coordinated dating horror stories. Her latest novel, Based Upon Availability (Harper Collins), was released last month.