The removers

By Andrew Meredith

Subjects: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary, SOCIAL SCIENCE, Philadelphia (pa.), biography, Literary, Corpse removals, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Young men, Families, Fathers and sons, Biography, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Death & Dying, Forgiveness, Personal Memoirs, Death & Dying, Family, Coming of age, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs

Description: "A literature professor, ... Andrew Meredith's father was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. It's a transgression [he] cannot forgive, for it brought about long-lasting familial despair ... [He] treads water, stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence--falling in and out of school, moving blindly from one half-hearted relationship to the next ... Broke, Andrew moves back home to his childhood neighborhood ... and takes a job alongside his father as a 'remover,' the name for those unseen, unsung workers who take away the bodies of those who die at home ... [and] begins to see his father not through the lens of a wronged and resentful child, but as a sympathetic, imperfect man who loves his family despite his flaws"--