âA darkly funny memoir about family reckoningsâ (O, The Oprah Magazine)âthe story of a young man who, by handling the dead, makes peace with the living.
Andrew Meredithâs father, a literature professor at La Salle University, was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. Itâs a transgression that resulted in such long-lasting familial despair that Andrew cannot forgive him. In the wake of the scandal, he frantically treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescenceâfalling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next. When Andrew is forced to move back home to his childhood neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia and take a job alongside his father as a âremover,â the name for those unseen, unsung men whose charge it is to take away the dead from their last rooms, he begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but through that of a sympathetic, imperfect man.
Called âartfulâ and âcompellingâ by Thomas Lynch in The Wall Street Journal, Meredithâs poetic voice is as unforgettable as his story, and âhe tucks his bittersweet childhood memories between tales of removals as carefully as the death certificates he slips between the bodies he picks up and the stretcher-like contraption that transports each body to the waiting vehicleâ (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). âPotentâ (Publishers Weekly), and âultimately rewardingâ (The Boston Globe), The Removers is a searing, coming-of-age memoir with âlyrical language and strong sense of placeâ (The Philadelphia Inquirer).