Throughout all this time he has two obsessions – the study of intergenerational trauma and music, specifically dance music from Donna Summer to obscure 00’s British DJ Oris Jay. Then, as an adult, he meanders in and out of college and in the process gets hooked on antidepressants that lead him on a downward spiral. As a teen, Michael sees a premonition on a walk in the forest and goes off to England to live with a friend. Haslett’s stream of consciousness is vivid and Allen-like, though the bulk of the (darkly) humorous lines in Imagine Me Gone go to Michael. In the quote, Alec takes the famous Woody Allen line from Annie Hall “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member” and applies it to his own situation. I barely took in what he’d said, wanting so badly to keep going myself, to confess that this was the first time I had ever spoken these words to any man, that I was ashamed to be thirty-one and never have reached this point before, that I was afraid my loneliness was a leprosy, a disfigurement, which, if he ever saw it, would repulse him. Alec keeps waiting for a time when “one of us would get bored on the Internet and decide to hook up with someone else, just for fun, and there would follow an awkward coffee date and that dwindling exchange of e-mails.” However, they do not break up and Alec says “I love you” first, which Seth reciprocates. Alec, the youngest son, contemplates his homosexuality throughout the book and has a difficult time committing a relationship. Not that the mother and the two other children are living perfect lives either. The narratives not only provide facts and move the plot, but also express feelings as if the characters of Inside Out are talking over one another in each person’s brain.Īs Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, “all happy families are alike each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Imagine Me Gone family certainly has its share of unhappiness: the father and oldest son Michael both suffer from (different) mental health illnesses, which stress the rest of the family. Each chapter is narrated by one of them and Haslett develops distinctive voices for each of them. There is a mother, a father, and three children – two sons and a daughter.

Haslett then spends 330 pages laying out the history of one family leading up to the pivotal moment that commences the book. Imagine Me Gone, the second novel by Adam Haslett, begins in the recent past. Adam Haslett’s novel “Imagine Me Gone” is a family story set to dance music loved by the oldest son

Imagine me gone book review