Linda Collins gets up on a Monday morning, dresses for work, makes coffee and goes into
her daughter Victoria’s bedroom, wondering why she hasn’t got up yet. It is an important
day for Victoria: the start of the second term of her final year at school and the day she
will hear her latest exam results. The bedroom is empty.

So begins every parent’s worst nightmare. Collins, a New Zealand journalist, writes with
startling candour about her daughter’s suicide: the secrets she kept from her parents, the
revelations in the personal journals she left behind, and the struggle of Collins and
Malcolm McLeod, Victoria’s father, to find answers in the midst of enormous grief.
How, they ask themselves, could they have missed the signs? What did the counsellors at
Victoria’s school know about her state of mind? Did her school friends have any idea how
desperate she was? And above all, why would a beautiful, talented, much loved young
woman take her own life?

Loss Adjustment is a book for our times, an examination of the tragedy of teenage suicide
from a profoundly personal viewpoint.