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Book Reviewed by: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.
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).
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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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.
