Opioids and Organs
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A heartwrenching memoir of a daughter losing her father and a scathing indictment of the medical industry
Arizona grieves at the hospital bed of her father, a man she hardly knew, brain dead after a fentanyl overdose. Doctors encourage her to act quickly to recast him as a hero by way of organ donations. Distraught, Arizona makes a decision that will haunt her for the rest of her life. As she struggles to come to terms with her father’s death and her role as next of kin in making his life’s last decision, she uncovers inconvenient truths about the organ industry’s own codependence on the opioid crisis.
Her parents were bohemian wild kids of 90s Montreal. He was a talented skateboarder, charming guitarist, and visual artist. She was an aspiring writer and outcast. They lived with other teenagers in the Plateau in a messy apartment filled with drugs, alcohol, and black-market animals. The city’s macabre history—McGill Medical School, the Mount Royal Cemetery, ancient cadavers at the Maude Abbott Medical Museum—takes center stage as Arizona sorts out fact from fiction.
Opioids and Organs is a damning critique of an industry that takes advantage of society’s outcasts. It is also the graphic novel debut of O’Neill herself, who weaves together a dramatic personal history with that of how humanity made its scientific advances. A muted yet striking pastel palette and a dolllike fantastical elegance belie both the gruesomeness of the book’s topic and the rage of its author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Montreal-based artist O'Neill's visually imaginative and emotionally raw debut memoir peers at the intersection of the opioid epidemic and the organ donation industry. After her father overdoses on fentanyl in 2014, Arizona agrees to donate his organs and receives a grateful letter from the family man who receives his heart. But rather than find solace, she obsesses. Colorfully grotesque, human-size organs appear all around her on the page, as she chats with Frankenstein's Monster and an anxious small yellow lizard. She questions why the families of donors don't receive compensation, and whether the "silver lining" that "each donor's death benefits 83 people" disincentivizes the Canadian government to end an epidemic that has killed its least valued citizens and benefitted its "good." The narrative mulls over the possibility of a conspiracy, but it's more of a meditation than an exposé. However, O'Neill reveals disturbing biases in the system that ranks "worthy" transplant candidates, noting that Black people are half as likely to be put on a kidney waiting list despite being four times as likely as white people to experience kidney failure. Along the way, the memoir dips into Alice's Wonderland and the Parisian catacombs. The result is a noble and irreverent, if inconclusive, pursuit of the question "Why do some bodies matter more than others?" This will leave readers curious about an often overlooked fact of death.
