The heart and other monsters A memoir

Rose Andersen

Book - 2020

"A riveting, deeply personal exploration of the opioid crisis-an empathic memoir infused with hints of true crime. In November 2013, Rose Andersen's younger sister Sarah died of an overdose in the bathroom of her boyfriend's home in a small town with one of the highest rates of opioid use in the state. Like too many of her generation, she had become addicted to heroin. Sarah was 24 years old. To imagine her way into Sarah's life and her choices, Rose revisits their volatile childhood, marked by their stepfather's omnipresent rage. As the dysfunction comes into focus, so does a broader picture of the opioid crisis and the drug rehabilitation industry in small towns across America. And when Rose learns from the corone...r that Sarah's cause of death was a methamphetamine overdose, the story takes a wildly unexpected turn. As Andersen sifts through her sister's last days, we come to recognize the contours of grief and its aftermath: the psychic shattering which can turn to anger, the pursuit of ever an ever-elusive verdict, and the intensely personal rites of imagination and art needed to actually move on. Reminiscent of Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich's The Fact of a Body, Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder, and Lacy M. Johnson's The Other Side, Andersen's debut is a potent, profoundly original journey into and out of loss"--

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Subjects
Genres
Autobiographies
Published
New York : Bloomsbury Publishing 2020.
Language
English
Main Author
Rose Andersen (author)
Physical Description
212 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781635575149
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Anderon's early disclosure in this heartbreaking memoir that she has no "concrete facts" that her sister didn't die of a drug overdose, but was murdered, might lead readers to believe that what follows is a true-crime investigation. Instead, what predominates is a loving portrait of Sarah, Andersen's baby sister. Sarah starts drinking around age12, having sex not long after, and trying OxyContin at 15. The prescription painkiller is too expensive, though, so Sarah quickly turns to heroin. Andersen alternates between the story of Sarah's death at 24 and the sisters' teen years, when she too was drinking and doing coke, all while lecturing Sarah about the oxy. Legitimate questions are raised about Sarah's death and the criminal elements she was cavorting with, but as noted, few are answered. The more interesting story, however, is that of Sarah and Rose; two sides of the same coin whose roles could easily have been reversed. Perfect for memoir readers who enjoyed Stephanie Wittels Wachs' Everything is Horrible and Wonderful (2018) or Maureen Cavanagh's If You Love Me (2018).

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Essayist Andersen's debut memoir is the riveting and raw story of her dysfunctional childhood and her younger sister's 2013 death from a meth overdose. Andersen and her sister grow up in California, with an artist mother and a father with writing aspirations who cheats on his spouse, lies, and verbally abuses his family. The couple divorces when the girls are four and 10, and their mother temporarily partners with an emotionally abusive boyfriend. As they grow older, each sister becomes drawn to drugs: Andersen becomes dependent on cocaine and alcohol (she later quits both, and conquers Hodgkin's lymphoma), but Sarah--drawn to opioids, heroin, and methadone--is unsuccessful in her attempts to get clean through rehab. Andersen is critical yet protective toward her sibling, and blames herself for not being more understanding and patient though she tries to support Sarah's rehabilitation. After Sarah is found dead from an overdose at age 24, Andersen scours the coroner's report and later court transcripts, delving into evidence suggesting that Sarah's lethal dose was not accidental, but rather, administered by a man who thought she knew too much about a heinous crime he had committed . This tragic tale of addiction will resonate deeply with readers. (July)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An essayist looks back on her life and the circumstances surrounding her sister's alleged overdose at age 24. "I know what I am doing," writes Andersen in the final third of the book. "I am curating her life. I take your hand and lead you through the blood and bile this story is made of….The unbearable note of grief still sings in my head. The melody of which you will never hear." In a note to readers on the first page, we learn that the author suspects her sister, Sarah, was murdered, although she has no proof. Then Andersen leaves that idea behind, imagining her sister's death as an accidental overdose, which is what both the police and the author believed when Sarah's body was found locked in the bathroom of her boyfriend's home, her dog wailing outside the door. As Andersen describes dealing with the logistics of the death and coping with her initial experiences of loss, she revisits her childhood, her troubled parents and stepfamilies, and her experience with cancer as a teen. Her own dark interlude with drugs and alcohol in her early 20s--"My worst lies happened when I was drinking and using coke…social lies, omissions, white lies, gray lies, kind lies, terrible lies"--eventually gave way to lasting sobriety through AA. The family story unfolds in brief, elegiac chapters illustrated with black-and-white snapshots. Gradually, Andersen begins to change the narrative, slipping in news stories about a seemingly unrelated murder, which, by the end, she has causally connected to her sister's death. The revised facts are presented in a report made to the police, included near the end of the book. Combining the agonizing emotional intensity typical of narratives about losing a sibling with the memoiristic style of a murder investigation successfully complicates the reading experience. A literary grief memoir combined with a skillfully unfolded murder mystery. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.