Adam Haslett: ‘I think of this book as a love story about a family’

Adam Haslett has drawn on his father’s suicide for his second novel, which explores events from a different family member’s viewpoint

Adam Haslett’s short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here was a Pulitzer prize and National Book award finalist. His first novel, Union Atlantic, won the Lambda literary award, and his second, Imagine Me Gone, is published by Little, Brown. He lives in New York.

Imagine Me Gone is about how individuals in a family respond to a father’s mental illness and suicide. Is it true to say it is based on personal experience?
This is the most personal book I have written. Mental illness is in my family – my own father committed suicide when I was 14. So it draws more directly on family material than my first novel, Union Atlantic. The challenge was to give myself enough distance from the material, to liberate myself from the facts. I had to give myself permission to use material from life, and also to depart from it, to take the imaginative leaps necessary to shape a novel.

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