Imagine Me Gone

Whenever I read a really good book, I like to do a blog post about it to get the word out. I finished reading Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett over this holiday weekend and it was the best book I've read so far this year. Let me say first that I've read all of Haslett's books and I think he's a really great writer. I stumbled on his first book, a short story collection called You Are Not a Stranger Here, when I was at the library looking for another book and enjoyed it so much that I went on to read his second book, a novel called Union Atlantic that's also great. I'd been waiting for him to pump out another book and, thankfully, he has.

Imagine Me Gone tells the story of a family's struggles with mental illness that begins with the father and carried through to one of his sons. The novel is, at times, painful to read when you see how the older brother Michael is just drowning under the weight of his own mind and how his family member (his mother and two siblings) are virtually powerless in their ability to help him. If you've ever dealt with mental illness in your family (and I have so I know), it's exhausting, frustrating, depressing, and everything in between. Haslett does such a masterful job of showing one family's attempts to stay afloat (mentally, financially, socially). Aside from the older brother Michael's mental issues, which take center stage in the novel, Haslett writes beautifully about the younger brother Alec's relationship with a man he meets (Seth) and eventually falls in love with. The passages from Alec's point of view that go into his relationship with Seth are really wonderful.