“A literary grief memoir combined with a skillfully unfolded murder mystery.”
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.
What People Are Saying
“Complex, dark, emotional, and enthralling, Rose Andersen’s THE HEART AND OTHER MONSTERS invaded my dreams from the first page to the last. She combines the fierce love of a devoted sister with the forensic brilliance of a ferociously talented writer. The result is impossible to put down, gorgeous, and will utterly break your heart. It haunts me still.”
— Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of THE FACT OF A BODY
“ Rose Andersen has written a gorgeous elegy to her sister, Sarah. In prose that is often mesmerizing, she creates a portrait of love and loss, addiction and sobriety. Of grief and ghosts. At the heart of this haunting memoir is the mystery of Sarah's death that Andersen tries to make sense of. Reminiscent of Rick Moody's poignant writing about the death of his sister, this beautiful book will break your heart.”
— Mary Morris, author of ALL THE WAY TO THE TIGERS
“Rose Andersen has given us a page turning, crisply written and heart wrenching story of two sisters coming of age in the social calamity and psychic mayhem that is contemporary America. The Heart and Other Monsters is a tragic tale full of struggles with addiction, personal failure, male rage and small-town despair. It's also an unforgettable portrait of a family, and the never-ending work of learning that is love”.
— Anthony McCann, author of SHADOWLANDS
“Rose Andersen's The Heart and Other Monsters will split your heart right open. It's both a love letter to the sister she lost and an investigation into what caused her death. Heartbreaking, illuminating, and poetic, Andersen's voice cuts through the gruesomeness of the facts she uncovers with the type of love that transcends death. More than a memoir, this book reassembles all the shapes that grief takes.”
— Erin Khar, author of STRUNG OUT: ONE LAST HIT AND OTHER LIES THAT NEARLY KILLED ME
“The Heart and Other Monsters dares to ask: when is love not enough? Rose Andersen searches for an answer in this vulnerable, unforgettable, and transcendent book that explores the pain of understanding what we can never truly know about another person.”
— Chelsea Hodson, author of TONIGHT I'M SOMEONE ELSE
“The memoir of a sister's death in which the line between overdose and murder becomes blurred, The Heart and Other Monsters is the story of two girls wounded by addiction and simultaneously troubled and sustained by a broken, complex family whose actions frequently fall short of their ideals. With the fierce honesty of Domenica Ruta's With or Without You, this is the most clearsighted depiction I know of what it's like to piece life together after a great, irreparable loss, and a deft navigation of the byways and channels leading up to that loss, through it, and beyond.”
— Brian Evenson, author of SONG FOR THE UNRAVELING OF THE WORLD
A kaleidoscopic portrait of sisterly love, addiction and abuse, set against the backdrop of an American epidemic, Rose Andersen's THE HEART AND OTHER MONSTERS slips form and genre to give words to ineffable loss. Emotionally taut, bare and honest, Andersen's memoir held me rapt from start to finish.
—Allie Rowbottom, author of JELLO GIRLS