My Sister from the Black Lagoon
A Novel of My Life
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
"I was born into a mentally ill family. My sister was the officially crazy one, but really we were all nuts."
So begins My Sister from the Black Lagoon, Laurie Fox's incandescent novel of growing up absurd. Lorna Person's tale is wrested from the shadows cast by her sister, Lonnie, whose rages command the full attention of her parents. Their San Fernando Valley household is off-key and out of kilter, a place where Lonnie sees evil in the morning toast and runs into the Burbank hills to join the animals that seem more like her kin. Lorna, on the other hand, is an acutely sensitive girl who can't relate to Barbie. "Could Barbie feel sorrow? Could Barbie understand what it's like to be plump, lonely, Jewish?"
My Sister from the Black Lagoon is a wisecracked bell jar, a heartbreaking study of sane and crazy. Laurie Fox's delightful voice is knowing yet wide-eyed, lyrical, and witty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A triumph of storytelling verve, dark humor and unabashed candor, Fox's autobiographical first novel (a poet, she wrote Sexy Hieroglyphics: 3,335 Do-It-Yourself Haiku) is the enthralling story of Lorna Person, daughter of a TV network accountant and a lovable 1950s mom and younger sister to Lonnie, the truly crazy child with a "frown that could launch nuclear missiles." Lonnie's mental illness is the natural disaster of the Person family, leaving every member hanging onto shreds of their selves. Or as Fox so aptly puts it, "Life with Lonnie was the only story. Until this story, which I hope to God is my own." In 23 funny, sometimes heartbreaking chapters, Fox takes Lorna (known to her sister as Oozy) from her lonely childhood in Burbank, Calif., to her roller-coaster teens in the San Fernando Valley and finally to UC-Santa Cruz, where she begins to claim her life. Many of the traumas and dramas are achingly familiar: an awkward childhood; an unwanted move; the discovery of friendship, love and sex (for this lucky girl, first love and first sex are mated); and, of course, the parents' divorce. No doubt, if that alone were Fox's material, she would have made a terrifically entertaining tale of it. But it isn't. What shadows this story is the crazy, terrorizing sister who dresses like a boy, wails like a bobcat and says, only too perceptively, "home sour home." As much as Lonnie torments her, Lorna does love her sister, trying always to protect her--from taunts and rocks and the knowledge that her brain works differently. And that is where the tension lies: How will Lonnie's Oozy ever become Lorna? The novel's subtext is television (apt for a novel partly set in Burbank), and, like TV, the narrative is episodic. A few episodes fall flat, yet big-hearted Lorna sustains this fresh and potent tale. Author tour. FYI: Fox worked at Warwick's Bookstore in California and helped start their reading program. She is a writer-in-residence in L.A. schools.