Once again, that style is not necessarily bad, it just needs to put in more effort to engage the reader and invest them in staying until the end.

More of a series of anecdotes that are connected by these people being blood relatives and nothing more. Not that characters have to be likable but it does make it harder to want to pick up a book when you don’t want to read about any of them.Īdditionally, the non-linear storytelling doesn’t do enough to ground the characters in a narrative. They’re all kind of predictable and none of them are very likable. They are archetypes such as: the concerned but fragile mother, the depressed hipster, the gay man-whore, the daughter who rose above it all. My main problem with the book is that all of the characters feel like stereotypes. Each chapter rotates through different family members describing their personal experiences either with mental illness or being adjacent to mental illness. Imagine Me Gone is told through shifting perspectives. But it just never plucked my heart strings. I’ve had my own bouts of depression and mental illness as well as a family history of it so I figured if anything would be relatable to me it would be this. I really thought that a book about a family suffering with clinical depression through the generations would be more touching to me.

Some of you may think that’s odd but the rest of you appreciate the value of a good cathartic tear-jerker! Now that I’ve read it and it didn’t make me cry I’m pretty disappointed. I had been putting off reading it because I was certain it was going to make me cry. Haslett’s prose, so finely adapted for each of the characters, seems to do just this, honouring the living and the dead and rendering life precious.I have had Imagine Me Gone sitting on my kindle for years. There is a lot about honour and care here: about what it means to honour and care for both ourselves and those we love. my two days of reading the book felt less like a reading experience than a life experience: two days of terror and loss. As in Faulkner, each of the voices emerges from somewhere between speech, thought and writing, but here the characters are articulate enough that we can believe that the words are theirs.

Haslett has a great gift for capturing the strikingly different inner worlds of his characters and rendering them in beautiful prose. But there is still a contemporary social critique at work: notably of the pharmaceutical industry and the frightening debts doctors allow vulnerable patients to incur. There seem to be conscious shades of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, as the narrative is told by alternating members of the family who even narrate their own deaths.

Imagine Me Gone makes the elemental American landscapes of the previous novel the setting for a more classical tale of family struggle.

Imagine me gone book review