Invisible Sisters
A Memoir
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed author of The Magnetic Girl delivers "an elegy for her dead sisters . . . a heartfelt, painful family saga, skillfully told by a survivor" (Kirkus Reviews).
When Jessica Handler was eight years old, her younger sister Susie was diagnosed with leukemia. To any family, the diagnosis would have been upending, but to the Handlers, whose youngest daughter, Sarah, had been born with a rare, fatal blood disorder, it was an unimaginable verdict. Struck by the unlikelihood of siblings sick with diametrically opposed illnesses, the medical community labeled the Handlers' situation a bizarre coincidence. By the time she was nine years old, Jessica had begun to introduce herself as the "well sibling."
Deeply moving and exquisitely written, Invisible Sisters is an extraordinary story of coming of age as the odd one out—as the daughter of progressive Jewish parents who moved to the South to participate in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as the healthy sister among sick, and eventually, as the only sister left standing. In a book that is as hard to forget as it is to put down, Handler captures the devastating effects of illness and death on a family and the triumphant account of one woman's enduring journey to step out of the shadow of loss to find herself anew.
"An unsentimental but deeply moving look at the ways in which loss––loss past and the loss that is still to come––can shape lives . . . a quiet, near-hypnotic tour de force."—Michael Wex, New York Times bestselling author of Born to Kvetch
"Both heartbreaking and hopeful."—Ann Hood, bestselling author of The Book That Matters Most
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Based on a Pushcart Prize nominated essay, this clear-eyed, candid work portrays the immense emotional toll that two daughters' illnesses take on a family living in Atlanta. Of the Handlers' three daughters, two developed fatal, rare bone-marrow disorders: Susie was diagnosed with leukemia when she was six and died two years later; Sarah, the youngest, suffered from Kostmann's syndrome, and died at age 27, in 1992. Haunted by these deaths, the author, the so-called "well sibling," revisits her conflicted childhood, when her father, a crusading civil rights lawyer from Harrisburg, Pa., and her kind, smart mother from Boston, were happy and still looking toward the future. The family's move to Atlanta in 1965 allowed the father to support labor unions, and Handler, as the oldest, was alerted to the importance of demonstrations and even taken to the funeral of Martin Luther King. However, with Susie's diagnosis (compounding the worry over Sarah's chronic sickliness), the parents "began the slow and terrible turning away from one another that erodes families facing the death of a child." In the last part of this affecting memoir, Handler struggles in her young adulthood to find her own way.
