Play Book Tag discussion

Since Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett made the National Book Awards longlist this month, I thought that it was time to read it. I finished it feeling a bit battered and broken. Mental illness and the ravages which it inflicts on family members are clearly depicted in this book.

Imagine Me Gone is told through shifting perspectives of the family members John and Margaret (the father and mother), Michael, Alec and Celia. I love a story told this way and Haslett is especially adept at this. Each voice is a clear reflection of the person. I found Michael who was perhaps the hardest to read also the most compelling. IN describing Donna Summer he says:

I packed five of her cassettes for the trip (the other twelve are in the crates). As you no doubt already realize, she is the avatar of an entirely new dispensation, machine-driven but secretly brokenhearted. I am convinced she is aware of this but tortured by it. “This monstrous, monstrous force.” That’s how she described her career to Rolling Stone.

About his anxiety:
What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who’s ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you can recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next.

This is a hard story, but I think an excellently told one. I can well imagine it being a love/hate book with a wide variety of ratings.

I recommend it for those going in with their eyes open.

I just finished this one, too. It put me through the emotional wringer! I think it was very well-written, and I felt the transitions between narrators was pretty smooth. It was a solid 4 stars for me as well.

Tracy wrote: "I just finished this one, too. It put me through the emotional wringer! I think it was very well-written, and I felt the transitions between narrators was pretty smooth. It was a solid 4 stars for ..."

It is pretty emotional. I thought some of the writing was pretty brilliant, especially Michael's , even though I found those the most difficult to read.

I'm not sure about this. I'm sure it's great, but I'm not sure I can take the emotional Rollercoaster.

Jennifer P. wrote: "I'm not sure about this. I'm sure it's great, but I'm not sure I can take the emotional Rollercoaster."

I don't think it is a book for everyone and there were points in the book in which I wondered if it was even a book for me.

The writing is very good and character studies are excellent.