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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 2016, 368 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2017, 368 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Rebecca Foster
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From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go for those we love the most?
When Margaret's fiancé, John, is hospitalized for depression, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic, and the story of how, over the span of decades, his younger siblings - the responsible Celia and the tightly controlled Alec - struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled existence. Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how you see the most important people in your life.
Alec
As I stepped out of the cabin, whiteness blinded me. The snow-covered yard glistened under the full sun. Icicles lining the roof of the shed dripped with meltwater. The fir trees, which had stood motionless and black against the gray sky, appeared alive again, green and moist in the fresh light. The footprints that Michael and I had made on the snowy path were dissolving, fading into ovals on the flagstone. Beneath our tracks in the driveway I could see gravel for the first time since we'd arrived. For weeks it had been frigid cold, but now had come this December thaw. I wasn't certain what day it was, or what time, only that it had to be well after noon already.
Across the road stood the young lobsterman's truck. Brown water seeped from the icy muck caked to its undercarriage. The red tarp covering his woodpile showed through a dome of melting snow. Up the slope, on the roof of his little white Cape, smoke rose from the chimney into the sheer blue.
I had to ...
The parents and siblings here are interdependent in many ways, especially as they try to rescue each other from the present reality and aftermath of mental illness. This is a powerful read for fans of family stories...continued
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Joy Williams, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Quick and the Dead
Adam Haslett's second novel is about family, love, forgotten music, and a despair that proves unbearable, and has one of the most harrowing and sustained descriptions of a mind in obsessive turmoil and disrepair that I've ever read. Haslett is a marvelously lucid and intelligent writer. Peter Carey, Man Booker Prize winner for True History of the Kelly Gang
Imagine Me Gone is literature of the highest order. It manages to be both dreadfully sad and hilariously funny all at once. It is luminous with love. Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America
Imagine Me Gone is beautiful, it's terrifying, it's intimate and epic, and it's devastating - one of the great books about loss and mourning and the ineluctable laws that govern the political economy of families. I cannot describe the force or the depth of its accomplishment except to say that this magnificent work of art has overwhelmed me and broken my heart. It will take me a long time to come to terms with this novel.In Imagine Me Gone, John and his son Michael, both struggle with mental illness.
Significant research has been conducted to search for the genetic basis for mental disorders. Family linkage and twin studies are particularly revealing. At present, there is no simple answer as to how mental illness might pass through families; environmental factors and the child's development interact with genetics to make it a very complex matter. Any mental disorder is probably encoded for by multiple genes, meaning it cannot be detected by a simple genetic test as is possible for conditions like Down's syndrome or cystic fibrosis.
However, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the susceptibility to mental illness "is ...
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