The Heart and Other Monsters (Bloomsbury Publishing)

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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.

The Heart and Other Monsters by Rose Andersen is an intimate exploration of the opioid crisis as well as the American family, with all its flaws, affections, and challenges. 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. 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 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 ever an ever-elusive verdict, and the intensely personal rites of imagination and art needed to actually move on.

Rose Anderson received her MFA in writing at California Institute of the Arts, where she was awarded the Emi Kuriyama Thesis Prize. Her essays have appeared in The Cut, Glamour, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles with her spouse, Josh, and their dog, Charlotte.

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, the Prix des libraires du Quebec 2020, and the Prix France Inter-JDD, an award for one book of any genre in the world. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Boston Globe, Oxford American, Harper’s, and many other publications. They are now an assistant professor at Bowdoin College and live in Portland, Maine, with an enormous puppy.

Skylit: The Heart and Other Monsters by Rose Andersen, with Alex Marzano-Lesnevich