Patriarch John suffers from bouts of major depression, something his girlfriend Margaret only becomes aware of when he is hospitalized during their engagement. She decides to stay the course and marry him anyway. Their marriage produces three children: Michael, Celia, and Alec, who each learn to cope in their own way with their father’s mood disorder and the emotional and financial strain it puts on their family. The feeling of dread made me put the book down for a couple of days until I felt ready to forge on.

Imagine Me Gone explores the devastating toll of mental illness on both the sufferers and the loved ones who care for them. The opening scene is a flashback to a death, hinting at a suicide. When I read the publisher’s summary of Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown, 2016), I recognized a family like much like my own and knew it was a book I had to read. It enables us to see ourselves and our experiences, both good and bad, within the world at large without fear of personal exposure. Imagine Me Gone is a literary achievement of the highest order.Lovers of literature know that great fiction always reveals truth.

Painful are the realities of our limits to save, but I had nothing but forgiveness and empathy for Haslett's fatally flawed characters and those in my own life who have succumbed to the monsters that can unwittingly surface from our innermost selves. I underlined passage after passage of brilliant and insightful descriptions of the love of a mother or sibling and the sacrifices made in order to come to terms with the maladies afflicting a loved one. Imagine Me Gone drew out of me a full range of emotion: the family he created inspires me to both celebrate and mourn my own family for the struggles we never imagine the moments of grace we least expect and the tragedy of instability. There are tragedies, triumphs, and moments of grace. It’s told in the voice of each family member, in addition to John, Margaret, and Michael, there is Celia-high functioning and capable-and Alec, driven, ambitious and tightly wound. Haslett weaves a narrative of each member of the family in a 50-year saga. The novel takes place over decades and with intimate detail and some humor as we live with the family as they go about life. Their son Michael has inherited his father’s mental illness. When financial strain hits, John has more and more recurring periods of hibernation. Such is her sense of commitment and love that she marries John and they have three children. In the 1960s Margaret faces a choice when her fiancé John is hospitalized for depression. Novelist and short story writer Adam Haslett’s new novel Imagine Me Gone portrays a family of five whose story is tragic, loving, and at times, gut-wrenching.

Imagine me gone book review