ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Gone Gone, Todd Meyers reckons with grief in the face of overdose death and with the afterlives of loss created by the opioid crisis. Through conversations with friends, lovers, and family members of those who are gone, Meyers brings readers into an inquiry about lives shared, told through tenderness and tragedy. Meyers seeks to find methods to record and convey the many experiences of grief in ways that do not simply consign sorrow to the world of drugs and addiction. Blending prose, poetry, and ethnography, Gone Gone is a lucid and devastating record that reminds readers that the grief felt by those who lose ones they love to overdose is varied and untamable.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Todd Meyers is Professor and Marjorie Bronfman Chair in Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University and author of, most recently, All That Was Not Her, also published by Duke University Press.

REVIEWS

“Like snowflakes on your tongue, Gone Gone melts into the work of mourning. Moving in its minimalism, evocative in its questioning of the mass casualty event that the opioid overdose death crisis has morphed into, the book insistently asks: Who are the gone gone and how are they still with us?”
-- Nancy D. Campbell, author of OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose

"In tender and photographic prose, Meyers documents and dilates upon the lives of three people (or characters?)—their loves, jokes, overdoses, shoplifting convictions, childhoods, joys, losses. Over the past two decades we’ve seen a great deal of excellent reporting and fiction on the mass casualty event that is opioid addiction; this is the first account I’ve found that must be respirated rather than read. Effortlessly intricate."
-- Molly Young New York Times Book Review

“There is something altogether raw and candid and poignant in Todd Meyers’s writing. He is crafting some of the most creative and significant writing in contemporary anthropology.”
-- Robert Desjarlais, Professor of Anthropology, Sarah Lawrence College

“In Gone Gone, Todd Meyers looks with the lyrical, attentive eye of the poet: We are invited into the sacred places of grief and move through love’s living resting places. The critical devotion at play here is moving, striking, affecting: I was changed by this book.”
-- Jenn Ashworth, author of Notes Made While Falling

“Here is a new language for grief, for tragedy, for the things about which we should rightfully be outraged, but which have come to feel grimly routine. Gone Gone is a book that has stayed with me; a book that deserves to stay with us all.”
-- Sam Byers, author of Come Join Our Disease

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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