The Heart and Other Monsters: A Memoir (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781635575149)

"Impossible to put down. It haunts me still." -Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

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, Rose revisits their volatile childhood, marked by their stepfather's omnipresent rage and their father's pathological lying. 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 coroner 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 an ever-elusive verdict, and the intensely personal rites of imagination and art needed to actually move on.

Reminiscent of Alex 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.

Author: Rose Andersen
ISBN-10: 1635575141
ISBN-13: 9781635575149
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Language: English
Published: 07/07/2020
Pages: 224
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.70w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/27/2020
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2020
Library Journal 05/08/2020 pg. 1
Booklist 05/01/2020 pg. 8
Shelf Awareness 07/10/2020