My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance

I found this an engrossing, lyrically written memoir. What struck me most was the author's ability to present the lives of her family without judging.

The proud and vain mother, the bad sister, the good sister - the recognized female pathologies abound in this excruciating, gorgeously written family tale. Bad sister runs away, good sister stays home, but both begin to make the same sexual missteps in their often creepily parallel worlds. Ms. Flook's style is creative and precise, specializing in queasily accurate descriptions of bodily sensations. The author's frequent disdain for her younger self and sibling is both amusing and a little cruel. This book is fun to read, but you might not want to admit it!

There have only been two or three times in my life when I've read a book that transported me. One was Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (as one person wrote, "I could smell the hotdogs!") and now My Sister Life. Flook is a genius with words. She wraps them gently and meaningfully around feelings and places and expressions and time. She does not cheapen her family's history but tells it like it is in all its ugliness and beauty. I loved this book very much and now want to read her other works.

After dipping into this book when i first got it, I almost didn't read it. It appeared to be scene after scene of the ugliest and darkest life has to offer. But I had to read it. I thought maybe from it I could better understand my own childhood, which followed a simliar, if blessedly less drastic consequences. I conclude that to the degree a mother withholds love from her child, it will self destruct. I hope I will be able to erase the pictures of the harrowing parallel lives of Maria and her sister.

Maria's Flook's memoir My Sister Life avoids the conventions of lurid girl-gone-bad pulp by prying into her subjects with honesty and a sense of verbal and narrative experimentation, rendering it as page-turningly fascinating as the best of novels. She switches back and forth between her own and her sister's voice, embellishing her prose along the way with vivid little images like the spider that gets trapped under her bathing cap, a dead shrew reanimated by beetles and the carnivalesque atmosphere of a whore house. Her acute sensitivity to her characters and their motivations both undermine and enhance this biography's dark exterior; for all the brutal sexuality and druggy low-livelihood there is an equal dose of tenderness and a search for dignity within her peoples' lives. A must-read for anyone who thinks they have a "disfunctional" family.