Claudia Putnam's Reviews > Imagine Me Gone

Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett
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bookshelves: literary-fiction, mental-illness
Read 2 times. Last read May 15, 2016 to May 18, 2016.

Nothing but spoilers here. I don't hide reviews because of spoilers, because I figure we're here to discuss books. So, consider yourselves warned if you don't want to know what happened.



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"As Michael saw it, capitalism had been cruel to our father, giving him no quarter when he was down, the weight of no money and too much responsibility dragging him under. Which didn’t mean he hadn’t been sick, but that there had been no margin for being sick."

and

"There is so much drivel about psychoactive meds, so much corruption, bad faith, over- and underprescription, vagueness, profiteering, ignorance, and hope, that it’s easy to forget they sometimes work, alleviating real suffering, at least for a time."

So. Go kill yourself, why don't you? Oh, here, I'll help you. We'll all pitch in, under the guise of being your loving, supporting family members.

I hate to come down hard, because obviously the author has some personal history here, some of which you can learn about if you google around, or read the May/June 2016 edition of Poets & Writers. I don't know, and I'm not going to try to find out, exactly what happened to Haslett's brother, but what happens to the character Michael in this book is murder. Perhaps not premeditated, because Alec is a little too ignorant and arrogant to have exactly planned what happened, but my feeling is that he and Celia and even their mother, Margaret, got sick of dealing with Michael and basically offed him. They essentially said, look, you can live on our terms only, and since those were not livable terms, they left Michael with pretty much no choice, and on some level they (and especially miss LCSW Celia) knew this even if they didn't quite let themselves become fully conscious of it. They were all smart and educated enough, and they had the experience with their father...

Because... say you have a father who dies of depression. Say you're smart and educated. Say for some reason your mother never bothered to look into this disease and respond to it as a disease. We'll cut her a little slack and ascribe this to the era and the culture, even though that era and that culture were really on the cusp of becoming more enlightened right then, so she had a choice and could have selected becoming more aware and more supportive as option B. I mean, right around where she lived on both sides of the pond there were the whole things with Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and I think there was a famous memoir that came out (I can't find the book because it's packed away, but there was a memoir in the sixties about being hospitalized in England with manic depression)... You didn't HAVE to have your head in the sand. There was information available to the smarter set. The mother, having chosen, after a direct question by the doctor as to whether she is prepared to take on this man with this disease (though no real info about the disease is provided, nor does she ask for any), proceeds to expect him to perform according to the usual expectations of a husband, father, and provider in society--ie, with no margin for being sick. She proceeds to have not one but three children and to want to be supported in a lifestyle that requires considerable means. She proceeds never to question any of her assumptions and never to offer any emotional support or to enter into any perspective other than her own--in fact her tunnel vision is as narrow as any depressive's.

So... say you have a father who dies of depression. And then you have this brother who is obviously pretty disturbed as well. They're calling it, it seems, though it is never quite clear, generalized anxiety disorder. It seems to me bipolar is a possibility, and clearly there's some kind of delusional disorder. Anyway, some kind of crippling anxiety. And no one, including the daughter/sister who goes on to become a therapist, of whose motivations regarding this choice we see pretty much nothing, does any research into the disease-ness of this? Or into their father's disease?

Yet, they are entirely wrapped up with Michael's condition, unable to let it go or to let him be anything but what they need him to be, which is not sick. When Michael comes into his mother's room at night in the midst of a crushing panic attack and needing to go to the hospital, she refuses to call an ambulance. Sirens and lights outside the house in the middle of the night? Unthinkable, she says. She will not have that.

Similarly, the other siblings will not have him ruining their mother financially. Even if she is willing to support him, they will not let her. That would mean they would have to support her later. In effect, they would rather see him dead.

Though what they say is that he needs to get off medications, because it is the medications, they say, that have made him sick.

Also, they agree, they cannot afford to send him to a "spa," where he could get off his medications, so Alec will have to take him to a remote cabin in Maine to do this solo. Um. It's addicts who go to spas, not people with mental illnesses (not saying addiction is not a mental illness) who are wanting to titrate down from or change psychotropic medications. Which the therapist sister should know. Just to point out how far removed from reality these people are.

And this is the myth they pursue to the end. I wish I could sue the doctors and the makers of all those medicines, Margaret, the mother, says at the funeral. Because of course, it's Michael's dependencies on all the medicines that DID make him so physically sick, and his withdrawal from Klonopin, so precipitously forced by Alec during their one-month retreat in Maine, that ultimately killed him (a simple Google search could have told Alec this might happen with a rapid benzo withdrawal). *I* could have told him that. SURELY Celia knew this. And absolutely Michael did know this and absolutely Michael several times told Alec.

It wasn't the doctors who weren't listening to Michael, it was his family.

It isn't that medicine isn't the answer, it's that sometime there AREN'T any great answers, and it's easy to blame this fact on doctors and on the medicine.

Things I wondered about: during the times when Michael's illness was in relative remission, why were there no treatment plans? Why was he given no skills and strategies for managing his symptoms and behavior THEN? Those were the times for intervening with mitigation approaches like diet, exercise, meditation, sleep hygiene, and many other tactics. SURELY Celia knew this. Surely it was for Celia to raise these questions, even if from afar. I do blame Michael's doctor for not managing treatment plans in this way, but then again, he wasn't being paid, it seems. There is only so far you can go with your anger at the professionals if you are not paying the professionals.

(Nit: I wished Haslett's portrayal of Celia's income hadn't been so unrealistic. He says she is earning enough as a social worker to support her and her boyfriend as he writes scripts, in the Bay Area. Hahahahha. My husband was a social worker for years and years and even when he was a supervisor we couldn't get by on his income in Boulder. I'd bet that in the job Haslett described she was barely cracking $40K. Then she shifts to being a therapist and building her own practice. After this is stabilized, her boyfriend is able to go back to working part-time. Just for the record, it's pretty unusual for therapists in their own practices to earn much more than $60K. They may earn a lot hourly, depending on whether and for what percentage of clients they take insurance for (and if they don't take insurance, aren't they doing putting patients in the same boat Michael was in?), but so many patients cancel, and also it's pretty grueling to see patients 40 hours per week; most therapists can't hack that and don't. So, not usually the primary wage earners, particularly in places where the cost of living is high. I just wanted to call attention to this because it's part of the bubble of unrealistic thinking that surrounds fields like teaching and social work and therapy. Architecture, too, for that matter. But as far as the book goes overall, it's just a nit.)

(I kept wondering if I actually knew the characters Celia's friends from Boulder were based on. :D Though I judged them for leaving their 9-month old for a weekend. Who does that?)

I guess where I'm going is that there's some serious displacement of responsibility. We're stuck in the characters' heads, so there's no real authorial voice. Therefore, we can't tell how much of the anger at medication and psychiatry is the characters' dodginess and how much is the author's and that's an uncomfortable place for the reader to be standing in. It's also potentially a dangerous place, because so much of society is right now standing exactly here, ready to displace all of its own anxiety and muddied thinking about mental illness into the laps of the very people who are most able and willing to help mentally ill people. That is, the people who are most confused, who know the least, who are the most disinclined to do the research, are those who most inclined to punt the blame to those who DO know the most, and as they mount their diatribes and tell their extremely narrowed-down stories, their tales are also very likely to mesh with the tendencies of those already disposed to think YEAH!! Medications!! Just as I thought!! They fuck everyone up!! Big pharma!! See what they do!! Doctors!! They don't know shit!! All they do is get people addicted!! And so, people who need help but who are teetering on the fence of to medicate or not to medicate, or should I get medical help for my child or not, are very likely to be swayed against doing so until it's too late, or until certain pathways in the brain are harder-wired. It's too bad.

It's not the job of novels to serve causes, but I have the feeling this book was meant to serve A cause, and I'm not sure it's serving mentally ill people in the best way.

In dysfunctional families, people fight over the scraps of love and attention. A sense of scarcity rules. As a child, Michael and Celia bullied and ignored their brother Alec. As an adult, Alec grew up to be the most functional and successful of the three. He in turn bullied the other two and even their mother. Locked in their own drama, the parents ignored their kids' needs. Because he is the kid who is most likely to duplicate the abandonment pattern instigated by their father, and in fact did abandon them as their father was sinking into depression, the other kids cannot refrain from punishing Michael. They simply cannot see past their own needs. The trouble isn't that the "system" doesn't advocate for Michael, but that his family does not. Of course, if he didn't have a family, the trouble would also be that the system did not advocate for him. But in terms of the problems posed by this novel, the failure is in the family.

The novel gets this. I believe the author gets this. But I'm not sure it's made clear enough to the reader. If you read through the reviews, there is a lot of praise for the loving family. The book seems to have been read as a reflection on the inevitability of suicide, though I'm not sure if this was the author's intention. If so, it's a shameful attempt to let this family off the hook.

This is a grave concern, because as I've said, it wasn't a suicide but a murder.

One of the book's great successes is the way in which the Michael sections work to make you see how tedious mental illness really is. So often the mentally ill are romanticized as brilliant but tortured souls. Great artists and intellectuals who are medicated at our peril as a society. That is, if they were left alone, they'd produce great works and great art. *If only we understood them.* It's society's failing and not theirs.

But the Michael sections, I feel, render the mind of one form of mental illness pretty darn well exactly as it is, and we can quite clearly see that there is nothing to see, really. Michael is creative, certainly, but dull overall. The cup overfloweth, and too much is just too much. Many readers just checked out as a result of these sections. The risk the author took here was in showing us how this kind of mind works--rubbing our faces in it. Maybe it's too much realism, but its archival value is high. You can see how both the owner of such a mind and those who live nearby could easily get sick of it. Sick to death of it.

And how, even if you got better for a while, you might be haunted by the knowledge, as was John, the father, of how easily the monster might return.

On the other hand, why not be inspired, when you're ill, by the knowledge that as you sicken, so might you return to health, as this is also the nature of these cyclical illnesses? That's the part about these failed support structures that I can't understand. Yes, we all tire. Yes, the monster comes back. But it also retreats. For some reason, friends and family seem to forget to remind the ill of this. People choose to live in fear rather than in hope.

So, having gone through the Michael sections with Michael and with Michael's loved ones, why wouldn't we along with Michael and Michael's family, not want him to have relief? Preferably some kind of relief that's NOT death. "You need a hood," says the black kid Michael tutors. And it's a fact that despite all the interference Alec and, from afar, Celia, manage, Michael doesn't have one. A hood would help a lot. The right mix of medication and treatment tactics would help as well, and since we're never told which mix of meds he's carrying around and what exactly has been tried (presumably because we're limited to the family members' POVs and no one is interested to find out, not even Celia, a mental health professional), we can't really assess whether Michael is really at the point of no return and whether Alec's intervention is appropriate. Michael seems not to want it and responds to it only, it seems to me, because he wants the connection with his brother, rather than to what it is that his brother wants to do.

Alec, Celia, and Margaret want relief FROM Michael, not relief FOR Michael, just as we the reader begin to want relief FROM those Michael sections (to the point where some readers, as I mentioned, actually abandoned the book). What we should want, what they should have wanted, was a solution that worked for Michael. And there was never any inquiry, any powwow, which included Michael, which brought Michael to the table, into what that solution might have been.

Alec and Celia have brief moments at the very end, in which they realize that they never did see Michael as a man with an illness, and Celia seems to change her approach to her patients slightly. Alec has an especially poignant moment when he admits to himself that he's always loathed both his father and his brother for they way they failed or refused to participate in the competitive game that is manhood in America. That was interesting and opened the possibility to though did not result in a full examination of Michael's death being somewhat of a revenge killing for all that childhood bullying. The insight/change at the end seems brief and nowhere near as weighty enough for all that happened.

In any event the book I thought of the most when I got done reading this was A Separate Peace.

Suicide is preventable in nine out of 10 cases, according to the US Dept of Health and Human Services. Many people who survive suicide attempts report immediate overwhelming regret once the attempt was underway. Here, for example, is an article about people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/200.... "As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, 'I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.'"

Maybe that's something people left behind can't imagine someone who's just killed himself realizing in his final second. Or something they're afraid to imagine.












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Quotes Claudia Liked

Adam Haslett
“It’s easy to make too much of fathers, I want to say.    A”
Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

Adam Haslett
“There is so much drivel about psychoactive meds, so much corruption, bad faith, over- and underprescription, vagueness, profiteering, ignorance, and hope, that it’s easy to forget they sometimes work, alleviating real suffering, at least for a time. This was such a time.   I”
Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

Adam Haslett
“I had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see.”
Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone


Reading Progress

Finished Reading (Hardcover Edition)
May 15, 2016 – Started Reading
May 15, 2016 – Shelved
May 18, 2016 – Finished Reading
May 19, 2016 – Shelved as: literary-fiction
May 19, 2016 – Shelved as: mental-illness
May 29, 2016 – Shelved (Hardcover Edition)
May 29, 2016 – Shelved as: literary-fiction (Hardcover Edition)

Comments Showing 1-2 of 2 (2 new)

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Claudia Putnam Lots of thoughts on this one, but must go out of town. Hope I don't forget what I want to say.


Dennis I agree with much of what you say and won't nitpick on the rest. Michael is tiring for the family but these illnesses generally are. Having seen enough of the Prozac generation, I have two thoughts: many doctors sought to solve everything with medication without getting in deeper to whether the patients needed it (or that addicts are terrible liars) and many patients look for a pill instead of global lifestyle changes and coping techniques. As an added note, Celia was too bland and unrealistic to complain about; as you point out, she MUST have known better and no one can rent in San Francisco on so little money unless they luck in. An unsatisfying read, I'm not surprised that people gave up on Michael, but if it gives someone a glimpse into his inner torture, it will be worth it.


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