My Sister Life
The Story of My Sister's Disappearance
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5.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
When Maria Flook's fourteen-year-old sister Karen disappeared from their suburban home, the author was changed forever. My Sister Life maps the story of two castaways from American suburbia who, while apart from each other, live mysteriously parallel lives.
With unrelenting realism and beguiling wit, Flook gives us an intimate account of her sister's life as a child prostitute, and of their coming of age in the 1960s--that surreal and wrenching moment of baby-boomer disenfranchisement, when the sexual revolution collided with the domestic fallout from the Vietnam War. From the ocean liners and Paris vacations of their refined upbringing to the gritty peepshows and adult theaters where they find jobs, the girls flee from a beautiful and tormented matriarch with secrets of her own.
Her missing sister becomes Flook's secret heroine--the sole example to follow in her journey into womanhood. The sisters live in trailer parks. They are faced with sexual assault, car thefts, and petty crimes with unpredictable men. Escaping from an abusive Vietnam vet, Karen takes her toddler to join her sister, who is herself raising a baby on her own; it is the first time they are under the same roof since their childhood. Their unorthodox reunion allows the sisters to forge a life-saving bond.
My Sister Life moves beyond biography or memoir to give us an astonishing vision of an American family--an authentic testimony to the defiant, undaunted faith between two sisters who connect after years apart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1964 when Flook was 12, her 14-year-old sister, Karen, ran away from their upper-middle-class home in the Wilmington, Del., suburbs, and fell into a life of prostitution and substance abuse. Soon, Flook herself became a drug-, alcohol- and risk-taking delinquent. The dynamics of a privileged family in which two daughters were propelled into self-destruction by maternal malice and paternal weakness are related by novelist Flook (Family Night) in a searing narrative of astonishing candor. Her own existence from that moment was irrevocably tainted, and she lived in the shadow of her sister's flight: "I thought what had happened to Karen could happen to me. I recognized a mysterious `sister life' unfolding parallel to mine.'' She narrates the events in her own downhill slide with harrowing specificity, alternately segueing to Karen's voice, which supplies details that Flook gathered obliquely through the many years that the sisters were apart. Yet they were bizarrely connected via amazing coincidences in which they endured dangerous accidents, unsavory sexual adventures and other experiences almost simultaneously. While the graphic accounts of their individual debasements are shocking, it is the picture of their beautiful, icy and vindictive mother that will haunt readers. Like the voluptuous wicked stepmother in Snow White, Veronica Mitchell's narcissistic eroticism, and the perverted messages about female sexuality she inflicts on her daughters, makes her the most vivid character in the narrative. Flook renders this unsparing account of sordid behavior in controlled prose that combines tense lyricism with coarse street vernacular. Some readers may find her use of Karen's life exploitative (her sister is reported to have welcomed the book, however), and may wonder at the validity of her assumption of her sister's voice. Yet the overwhelming effect of this brave and edgy work is as a testament to lives reclaimed from mental torment and physical degradation to some measure of healing and redemption.
