At the age of 24, Rose Andersen’s sister Sarah died of a drug overdose. After years of battling a heroin addiction, an overdose was not entirely unexpected; however what did surprise Rose was that it was not a heroin overdose which killed her sister, it was methamphetamine. This detail prompted a series of questions that revealed a startling web of events around Sarah’s death. The Heart and Other Monsters is Rose’s beautifully painful retracing of these events, of her sister’s life and death, in an attempt to untangle this web and reconcile the loss of a loved one.
Unlike anything I’ve ever read, Andersen’s memoir takes a unique approach to the genre with a mixture of memories and heartbreak infused with speculation and echoes of true crime. The Heart and Other Monsters begins by recounting the girls’ childhood and how certain experiences influenced both of their lives. As Rose and Sarah grew older, their relationship grew distant, even more so as Sarah descended further into addiction while Rose achieved sobriety in 2008. Andersen imagines the events leading up to her sister’s death, as well as the death itself, in painstaking detail, piecing together extensive reading and research from Sarah’s diaries to the coroner’s report itself. These efforts seem to simultaneously be a way for Andersen to process her grief while ruminating on the questions that plague many who have lost loved ones in tragic situations — what could she have done differently to prevent her sister’s death, was it in part her fault? Perhaps the most startling aspect of Andersen’s tale, however, is the possibility that Sarah’s death was not in fact an overdose, but rather a murder. Although she admits from the start that she has no solid proof, Rose explores the possibility that her sister was killed as the result of having knowledge about a robbery gone wrong.
This memoir tackles so much, all weighty topics, from personal loss to the nationwide issues of addiction. Andersen addresses the ongoing “opioid epidemic” in the United States, born from the vast growth and over-prescribing of pain medications in previous decades. She questions the business of substance abuse treatment, uncertain of the efficacy yet certain of the vast amount of money the industry draws in each year. She lays bare the devastation that addiction can bring not just to individual lives, but also to families as a whole.
Andersen, much like her writing, has an intense strength about her. The words she has laid down on the page are raw and piercing, gritty and so real. A tremendous amount of love is also expressed in this book alongside guilt, frustration, and surprise as to how things came to this point. With short, propulsive chapters, The Heart and Other Monsters is a book readers will be unable to look away from, even in its most painful moments.
The Heart and Other Monsters is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of July 7th 2020. Many thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for providing me with an advance copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
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 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.
Reminiscent of Alexandria 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.
