A darkly funny memoir about family reckonings O, The Oprah Magazine—the story of a young man who, by handling the dead, makes peace with the living. Andrew Merediths father, a literature professor at La Salle University, was fired after unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct. Its 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 adolescence—falling 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 remover, 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.
