Secret Girl

I strongly recommend this memoir to anyone searching for meaning, lessons in compassion and self-definition. Molly Bruce Jacobs has somehow wrenched out her raw emotions from deep inside and painted them into words- of herself and her family's life. This gifted ability of hers is rare and must have taken a lot of courage to get out. What I felt from this memoir is that money doesn't buy happiness- compassion and understanding does. I cried at parts, it was that true to me. (and it takes a lot to make me cry) I can't imagine being a teenager (the most vulnerable and emotional time in a girl's life) and finding out about a secret sister with hydrocephalus. For that time, it must have been common to hide people with disabilities, as it was to send off pregnant teens, but, even so, I wondered how Anne's parents really felt behind closed doors when nobody was around. The way Molly Bruce Jacobs expresses her own search for self is inspiring, and the way Anne changes her life is touching. It makes sense why Molly Bruce Jacobs turned to drinking as a young woman. It must have tuned out things she didn't know how to cope with at the time. By writing it down, and meeting Anne, a new world opened up for Molly Bruce Jacobs and her sister. They taught eachother how to see life in a different way. I loved the way Molly Bruce Jacobs described her cold and formal childhood, the city, the proper mansions and perfect lawns and the shady neighborhoods. It was so visual and emotional- all the good stuff a genuine memoir should be.

This book has to be read. From the first page to the last, I was spellbound by the words and the story. It was at once elegantly crafted and brutally honest. A daughter tells the story of her own family whose tragedy was written at the time of her hydrocephalic sister's birth. To blame the times or the personalities for their subsequent choices misses the point. Every family keeps secrets. This was Brucie Jacob's family and this was their secret. How each member played his part holds the fascination. You will be enriched by this family's trial and be tempted to write your own ending, but this is real life and the truth is more compelling than a happily-ever-after final chapter. There is redemption and there is loss and it all felt exceptionally personal to me. I am recommending this book to everyone I meet.

A beautiful and introspective telling of a search for a secret girl; the author's unknown mentally handicapped sister who had been institutionalized for many years. In many ways though, this book tells a much broader story of secrets forced upon us by a society bearing a rigid switch of "acceptable" protocols and mores, and the ways in which we find secret places to avoid the switch's sting. The poignant conclusion to this lovely and wise work reminds us of the human spirit's endless ability to learn and grow, and ultimately to forgive and to love.

I found Molly Bruce Jacobs' story at once poignant and unnerving for its unflinching look at the weird alchemy of qualities, positive and negative, that can exist simultaneously in the same family unit. In her own family, there was love, devotion, callousness, arrogance, ambition, aloofness, and guilt in spades -- to name just a few. This book tells the story of how, in early-adolescence, the author learned of her retarded sister's existence for the first time, and how, many years later, she entered, in both a physical and emotional sense, the life of that sister and was changed. I'm a psychologist, and I was born one year earlier than the author. Like her, I had a retarded sister who was diagnosed at birth with hydrocephaly. My sister was born two weeks before hers. Although my parents brought my sister home instead of having her institutionalized in the way that that the author's parents did, my sister ended up dying when she was only about two months old. I've wondered for many years in what fundamental ways my life would have changed had I grown up with a severely retarded sister, at home or somewhere else. I share that information in order to help explain why reading Molly Bruce Jacobs' book was an intensely moving and very personal experience for me. Sometimes the author's honesty is painful. Her book resists what might have been the easy thing to do -- villainizing her parents for the way they handled having a severely retarded child -- and instead allows nuance and ambivalence and paradox to creep in on nearly every page. Just when you're about to say of her parents, "Oh my God! How could they have been so callous [or so preoccupied with appearances]," the author steps in with a reminder about her parents' positive qualities, the ones that co-existed alongside some of the less desirable ones. I strongly recommend this book. It's beautifully, unpretentiously written -- and at its core is the story of a complicated woman's attempt to come to terms with a number of different kinds of love and a number of different kinds of loss. That the book ends with a quiet nod to the redemptive force of forgiveness -- especially self-forgiveness -- strikes me as fitting.

I can't even begin to describe all the ways I was touched by this story. As a lifelong hydrocephalus patient (nearly 40 years) and mother to a child with autism who could easily have ended up in a similar situation to Anne's, regarding demonstration of cognitive ability, had he been born at that time, I was completely consumed emotionally by all that Ms. Jacobs ("Brucie") relates in this amazing and compassionate recollection of her sister. When I was growing up, I also had a neighbor who had "hydro." His life might have turned out much like Anne's, had it not been for his courageous parents who took him home, loved him unconditionally, and accepted him completely for who he was. Knowing him taught me so much about how fortunate I was to be doing so well, having been diagnosed with this condition as an infant, while he was a toddler, and in his case, the neurological damage had already been done. I thought of him many times throughout my reading of the book, and of my own parents, who were keenly aware of the prevalent societal attitude at the time: that any "defect" or "difference" a child had was the mother's fault. This helped me forgive what I initially felt toward Anne and Brucie's parents (especially their mother), as well as my own, because I am keenly aware that today, so much more is available to all of us who are parents of children with any medical condition or disability, and that Anne's parents likely thought it was actually better for all concerned not to become emotionally involved with her. She was believed to have had a prognosis of a drastically shortened life expectancy as well, and there were no services except institutions and "infant nursing homes" at the time, so if they had been willing to take on the awesome responsibility of caring for what could have been a mulititude of profound needs in their daughter, they would have had to "just wing it" and cope without all the support and resources I have been fortunate to be able to take advantage of today for my son. Even their apparent fairly prominent wealth couldn't buy that for them, so they did what they seemed to truly believe was the only "right" thing: they sent Anne somewhere so she could be cared for by those whose job it was to provide for the needs of "her kind," as was the day's thinking. This is why I am amazed at Brucie's ability to see through the familial and societal thinking of the time and allow herself, even as she was in the throes of her own personal struggles--alcoholism, divorce--to connect with Anne on a truly emotionally intimate level and come to love her unconditionally, just as my neighbor's parents did for him. She vividly and eloquently illustrates what I have learned as a parent of a child with a "difference" myself: that they keep us young, make us old, and give us a love and appreciation for the simple joys in life that no other experience can.