Author photo by Julie Artacho; all illustrations by Arizona O'Neill
Arizona O’Neill| Longreads | May 19, 2026 | 961 words (10 minutes)
The dedication page for Arizona O’Neill’s Opioids & Organs reads: “To the parts of my father still out in the world.” O’Neill, a Montreal-based writer and artist, lost her father a decade ago to a fentanyl overdose. The two were estranged at the time; still, as next of kin, O’Neill was tasked with the choice of whether to donate his organs. “His death,” O’Neill told the Montreal Gazette, “was the most intimate we had ever been.”
Opioids & Organs scrutinizes a “silver lining” of an ongoing addiction crisis: a rise in organ donations. At his death, O’Neill’s father “was young, healthy, and well preserved,” she writes. “The perfect condition for organ harvesting.” It’s a dubious comfort for O’Neill. In Opioids & Organs, she gives remarkable vision and voice to her unease, detailing medical advancement’s historic relationship with exploitation and desecration. There is something fundamentally horrific, O’Neill observes, about trying to find the bright side of the opioid crisis: “We are still taking organs from groups of people society deems lesser.”
O’Neill’s work throughout Opioids & Organs is spirited and surreal. Her protagonist, Arizona, travels from Harvard University’s historic surgical theater to the Catacombs of Paris, excavating medical histories to try and resolve the complexities of her father’s death. She’s accompanied throughout by Izzy, her “obsessive personality lizard,” and Frankie, a sensitive literary icon with a paternal presence, each of whom appear in the excerpt below. The subject of her book is both disturbing and common, in need of illuminating perspective and complex consideration. In her debut graphic novel, O’Neill gives both, and generously. —Brendan Fitzgerald
