Rose Anderson - The Heart and Other Monsters

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.  

"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 clear sighted 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 

Rose Andersen’s debut memoir, The Heart and Other Monsters is now available from Bloomsbury. She received her MFA in writing at California Institute of the Arts where she was awarded the CalArts Emi Kuriyama Thesis Prize. She writes to the dulcimer snores of her Boston Terrier, Charlotte, and completes her stories despite the endless barrage of puns from her spouse, Josh. She is published in The Cut, Glamour, The California Sunday, Lit Hub, and Crime Reads among others.

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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