Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett is the author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, which was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, and the novel Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. His books have been translated into eighteen languages, and he has received the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, the PEN/Malamud Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations.

Haslett's latest novel is Imagine Me Gone.

From the author's Q&A with Sally Campbell at the Waterstones blog:

Can you introduce your new novel and your intentions when you first set out to write it?

To me, in essence, the book is a love story about a family. A young woman discovers her fiancé has been hospitalized for depression, but she decides to marry him in any case, and from that first act of love a family grows, faced over four decades with both the necessity and at times the impossibility of saving the people they love from what troubles them. How far will you go to save the people you love the most? That’s the question the book implicitly asks. My intention was to specify that dilemma as exactly as I could.

When you were writing Imagine Me Gone, did you feel a sense of responsibility with regard to it being a novel that portrays mental illness? Were you hampered at any point knowing that this is still an area that is widely misunderstood?

I think of the phrase “mental illness” as a kind of conceptual suitcase into which we tend to deposit a broad swath of human experience and then conveniently close the lid, label the case, and store it as far from ourselves as we can. The fact is...[read on]

Imagine Me Gone is among Saskia Lacey's fifty incredible literary works destined to become classics.

The Page 69 Test: Imagine Me Gone.

Visit Adam Haslett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue