Excerpt from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"At least we all speak the King's English." That's what his mother said to no one in particular at the dinner table the first time I visited his parents, outside Southampton. She was apparently less appalled at my accent than she'd expected to be. His father had installed a putting green by the side of the house, where he spent most of his afternoons before coming in for a supper he preferred eating in silence. At breakfast, there was the tea cozy, and cold toast in a rack, and at Sunday lunch mint jelly with the dry lamb, and in the evening being asked if I planned on taking a bath. John was and is his mother's favorite, the oldest, who went to Oxford and into business and wears good suits and understands there are proper and improper ways of going about things, all of which he plays up when he's around her, keen to reflect back her image of him.

I had a job at a library, out in the suburbs. I'd get up early to catch a train to Walton-on-Thames and then the bus along the high street to the red-brick Victorian fortress, where I'd stamp and shelve books all day, and then reverse the journey, riding back into the city on half-empty trains running against the commute.

A few months ago I read Mailer's Armies of the Night and it reminded me of what I had missed being away from America for most of the sixties, reading about the violence from overseas and hearing about it from my friends, always at a remove. There was one passage that stuck with me. After the posturing speeches followed by the melee at the Pentagon, once they've all been arrested and are being driven out to Virginia in buses in the dark, everyone quiet, Mailer writes it's in motion that Americans remember. Maybe he could have dropped "Americans" and just said "people." Either way, it struck me as true. If you think of memory not just as looking back but as being aware of time and how it passes and what the passage of it feels like, then there is something about being in motion that does cause it. Through some sleight of mind, physical forward motion makes time seem visible. Which causes me to think that maybe the unnatural speed of cars and jets actually creates nostalgia. Because the simplest way to block out the strangeness of time passing before your eyes is to fix it in place, to edit it down to monuments or potted plants.

Like, I suppose, my rides on those nearly empty trains back from Surrey in the early evenings, already dark in winter, passengers across the car visible in reflection on the glass—a fixed memory I carry now as a stand-in for the more particular instances of wanting badly to see John, to be done with the courtship so we could live together and see each other every night as a matter of course.

Or like all of this coming to me now in the car after I've handed out the surprise boxes and earned a lull in the children's impatience for a while, with the windows down and the salt air rushing in on us. Remembering being at a packed, loud party at the flat with John's roommates, everyone in ties and dresses, on the evening that the fire engines appeared at the building, and we all had to scurry down the four flights of stairs with our sloshing glasses, John running back up to grab his jacket in case the press appeared to cover the impending blaze—a jest to prevent the good cheer from dissipating on the sidewalk, which worked, keeping the laughter going until we got the all-clear and clambered back up to keep drinking.

It was almost grave the way he kissed me in the beginning. His nerves showed like they never did with friends; with them, words were the only currency that mattered. The contrast seduced me as much as anything. The American boys I'd dated in college and immediately afterward brought their offhand confidence into the bedroom, where it struck the same slightly false note that it did in company. John might have wanted to be that smooth, but with me he couldn't manage it. Which I've always decided to take as a compliment. And then, as if he'd betrayed himself in the dark, he'd up the gallantry the next day, appearing at my door with a picnic basket and a borrowed car and driving us into the countryside, where even if no one was around he still wouldn't try to touch me, as if it proved something about his character. I fell in love watching him do that. I knew the starkness of the difference between his savoir-faire and his wordless, heavy-breathing grasp in private owed something to his never knowing exactly where he stood with me, because he couldn't interpret me as easily as he could an Englishwoman. By the same token, I couldn't help wondering if my being an outsider in his world was what drew him most. Which could make me skeptical of him, parsing his words and deeds for signs that he'd noticed or appreciated something about me other than my foreignness.

Excerpted from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett. Copyright © 2016 by Adam Haslett. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.