Imagine Me Gone (Haslett)

Imagine Me Gone 
Adam Haslett, 2016
Little, Brown & Co.
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316261357


Summary
From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most?

When Margaret's fiance, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, 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 who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings—the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec—struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence.

Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family.

With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 24, 1970
• Where—Port Chester, New York, USA
• Raised—Oxfordshire, England, UK; Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Swarthmore College; M.F.A., University of Iowa; J.D., Yale University
• Awards—(See below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Adam Haslett is an American fiction writer. He was born in Port Chester, New York and grew up in Oxfordshire, England, and Wellesley, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College (B.A., 1992), the University of Iowa (M.F.A., 1999), and Yale Law School (J.D., 2003). He has been a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Columbia University. Fall 2011 he enjoyed half a year of free study work at the American Academy in Berlin. He currently lives in New York City, New York.

Books
His first book, a collection of short stories entitled You Are Not a Stranger Here, was released in 2002 and was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award and the 2003 Pulitzer Prize and spent some time on the New York Times Best Seller list. It was also named one of the five best books of the year by Time.

Haslett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Nation, Atlantic, and Best American Short Stories, as well as National Public Radio's "Selected Shorts." His first novel, Union Atlantic, was released in 2010 and his second, Imagine Me Gone, in 2016.

Awards
2002 - New York Magazine Writer of the Year
2002 - National Book Award, finalist
2003 - Pulitzer Prize, finalist
2003 - L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award (You Are Not a Stranger Here)
2006 - PEN/Malamud Award
2011 - Mary Ellen von der Heyden Prize, Fiction
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/8/2016.)

Book Reviews
Ambitious and stirring.... With Imagine Me Gone, Haslett has reached another level, affording readers a full and luminous depiction of a mind under siege.... By putting the readers in the same position as [oldest son] Michael's family members, Haslett has pulled off something of a brilliant trick: We feel precisely what they feel-the frustration, the protectiveness, the hope and fear and, yes, the obligation. If Michael is on the page, if his thoughts or actions are laid bare, there's a grueling sense of dread. If he's out of sight, if his thinking and whereabouts are unknown, the dread becomes all but unbearable.... This is a book refreshingly replete with surprise. It sneaks up on you with dark and winning humor, poignant tenderness, and sentences so astute that they lift the spirit even when they're awfully, awfully sad.... But make no mistake, the novel's most rewarding surprise is its heart. Again and again, the characters subtly assert that despite the expense of empathy and the predictable disappointment of love, our tendency to care for one another is warranted.... Even when it's difficult or terrifying or impossible, especially when it's impossible, the impulse to calm those we hold dear is an absolute privilege
Bret Anthony Johnston - New York Times Book Review


Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization and a limber, unpretentious style. Perhaps his rarest gift is the apprehension of the invisible connections that tie people together...The chapters seamlessly negotiate the passage of time.... [Oldest son] Michael comes to dominate the narrative, and Haslett perfectly captures the qualities that make him both seductive and infuriating. He is a motormouth with a fitful imagination and a wicked sense of humor; his nervous energy and 'ceaseless brain' are the battery power on which the whole family runs...Haslett is alert to the reality of others, and the insinuating power of this novel comes from its framing of mental illness as a family affair. Michael's siblings are both wholly convincing characters, shaped by the abiding question of how much, or how little, they are meant to act as their brother's keepers.... Most affecting of all is Margaret, who is treated with impatience by her children but possesses a capacious understanding...'What do you fear when you fear everything?' Michael wonders. 'Time passing and not passing. Death and life.... This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.' That condition, Haslett's superb novel shows, is an irreducible part of the fabric of Michael's family, as true and defining as the love that binds them.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal


We come to know the family at the center of Adam Haslett's powerful new novel as intimately as if they were our own.... Imagine Me Gone is the story of this family across the decades-a family that is bonded and riven and bonded again by mental illness.... [Oldest son] Michael is the center of the novel and certainly Haslett's most original character.... For the reader, as for his family, Michael is strangely dear, utterly maddening, and ultimately heartbreaking.
Tom Beer - Newsday


Powerful...a study of destructive family dynamics.... Family here is a trap as filled with love and concern as it is with exasperation and dread. Moving with penetrating wit between the points of view of a father, mother, daughter, and two sons, the novel traces how the vein of mental illness running through this family affects every membe.... Haslett, as he turns the narrative over to first one and then the other, is uncanny in nailing how their differences in personality and temperament guide their respective actions.... His sharp take on how minor family foibles become conflated with major family dysfunction introduces some unexpected comedy into the proceedings.... Haslett expertly evokes family behavioral patterns that simply repeat themselves, taxing everyone's patience, before precipitating into panic-inducing crises.... With its fugue of voices, each contributing a vital slant to the action, Imagine Me Gone offers rigorous formal pleasures. Yet while flirting with narrative artifice, Haslett stays keenly aware that in this family there is no explanation 'sufficient to account for the events.... Lives weren't works of art.' In acknowledging that, Imagine Me Gone respects the mystery of how things happen the way they happen, while brilliantly conjuring the tide-like pull with which dreaded possibilities become harsh inevitability.
Michael Upchurch - Boston Globe


A devastating family drama.... Haslett's considerable skills as a writer turn domestic conflicts into something more profound.... In one beautifully rendered scene after another, Haslett shows the family dealing with John's illness and Michael's descent while also managing their own conflicts.... Imagine Me Gone is a handsome work...the sort of writing that is guaranteed to turn heads
Michael Magras - Miami Herald


Searing... Devastating and gorgeously written.... Pure genius.... Haslett hits the nail on the head when it comes to describing just how anguishing and time-consuming psychiatric disorders can be, not only for the afflicted but also for the flailing loved ones trying their damnedest-and failing-to find a suitable fix.... Haslett writes with his eyes wide open about the pitfalls of piled-on medication, the panicked late-night phone calls, the cycles of fear, frustration, and guarded hope. And herein lies the kicker: Because these chapters are told from the alternating perspective of each of the five family members, we believe every word in them and bear witness to just how complex and multi-angled the issue of mental illness can be.... By signing on with Haslett and his characters we are given the chance to look beyond our minutiae and daily distractions in order to notice the passage of time as experienced by others. We are reminded of what it is like to be truly, if fleetingly, alive.
Alexis Burling - San Francisco Chronicle


Imagine Me Gone brilliantly captures the excruciating burden of love and the role it plays in both our survival and our destruction. Haslett suspends a sense of dread over you like an anvil from page one, cutting the rope that holds it in the brutal last act. You'd be a fool to look away.
Julia Black - Esquire


An extraordinary blend of precision, beauty, and tenderness.... Haslett's prose rises to the challenge, lushly capturing the dense fog of depression that blankets John [the father] and occasionally lbifts just enough to reveal the 'beast' moving in on him. But Haslett really shows his chops channeling [oldest son] Michael's amped-up voice.... I got caught up in the beauty of Haslett's sentences and the lives of these oh-so-human people bound by shared duress and cycles of hope. Haslett's signature achievement in Imagine Me Gone is to temper the harrowing with the humorous while keeping a steady bead on the pathos. You want sympathetic characters? You want a narrative that showcases love as a many-splendored thing capacious enough to encompass stalwart, long-suffering spouses, loyal siblings, suffocatingly obsessive crushes, and casual, noncommittal relationships (both gay and straight) that morph as if by magic into soul-sustenance? You want writing that thrums with anguish and compassion? It's all here.
Heller McAlpin - NPR

 
There are some bobbrred review.) [A] sprawling, ambitious epic about a family bound not only by familial love, but by that sense of impending emergency that hovers around Michael, who has inherited his father John’s abiding depression and anxiety.... This is a hypnotic and haunting novel.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [S]oaring, heartrending.... The [novel] is a polyphonic page-turner that slowly reveals its orbit around Michael, the eldest son. Michael's troubled psyche, an inheritance from his father, proves to be the troubling linchpin at the center of this intensely personal work.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [A] touching chronicle of love and pain....  As vivid and moving as the novel is, it's not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he's so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime use our LitLovers talking points to get a discussion started for Imagine Me Gone...then take off on your own:

1. Had you been Margaret—or even yourself—would you have made the same choice to marry John?

2. In attempting to explain the nature of depression to Margaret, the doctor tells her: "You could say the mind closes down. It goes into a sort of hibernation." Before reading Imagine Me Gone, what was your understanding of depression? Having read Haslett's book, have your views been altered...or confirmed?

3. Was it irresponsible of John to marry Margaret and father three children? What about his suicide?

4. Talk about the children of this union and their relationship with both their parents and with one another, especially with Michael.

5. If his father's mind is given to "hibernation," how would you describe Michael's mind? How does it differ from his father's?

6. A good deal of Michael's inner workings are revealed in his letters and his responses on medical forms. What do we learn of his reality?

7. Consider Alex's desire to spirit Michael away to Maine. Was the outcome inevitable? Was Michael naive?

8. Follow-up to Question #7 Were you taken by surprise at that outcome?

9. What does this book suggest about our responsibility to care for one another, despite constant and expected disappointment? Is there a point in which utter hopelessness gives us permission to no longer attempt active care?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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