Invisible Sisters [Hardcover]

Jessica Handler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 13, 2009

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 congenital blood disorder, it was an unimaginable verdict. By the time Jessica Handler turned nine, she had begun to introduce herself as the “well sibling;” and her family had begun to come apart.

Invisible Sisters is Handler’s powerfully told story of coming of age—as the daughter of progressive Jewish parents who move south to participate in the social-justice movement of the 1960s; as a healthy sister living in the shadow of her siblings’ illness; and as a young woman struggling to step out of the shadow of her sisters’ deaths, to find and redefine herself anew. With keen-eyed sensitivity, Handler’s brave account explores family love and loss, and what it takes not just to survive, but to keep living.

Editorial Reviews

From 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. (Apr.)
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Review

Ann Hood, author of Comfort and The Knitting Circle
“Invisible Sisters is both heartbreaking and hopeful. Even as Jessica Handler tells us of her family's losses, she reminds us to celebrate life. Handler shows us how to move forward without being afraid to look back. This book is a gift.”

Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods
“Invisible Sisters is 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. Jessica Handler’s book is a quiet, near-hypnotic tour de force.”

Rosellen Brown, author of Tender Mercies and Before and After
“Invisible Sisters chronicles the ambush of a happy family and its devastation in the face of every hope and effort. What Jessica Handler has rescued from grief, bravely and without self-pity, is the story of her own hard-won survival. The book in which she discovers a self separate from the anguished role she seemed destined to play haunted me from its very first page and has not let me go."

Kirkus, February 1, 2009
“With a sure grasp of revelatory detail, the author recalls homely verities from a vanished life. Her memory piece is an elegy for her dead sisters, who are not quite lost as long as they live in her thoughts. A heartfelt, painful family saga, skillfully told by a survivor.”

Teresa Weaver, Atlanta magazine, review April ’08 issue
“Some memoirs are affecting because they are universal, some because they are unique. Jessica Handler’s Invisible Sisters derives its gut-punch power from being both…. Handler tells this story with the lyrical elegance and cool remove of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking—the highest praise possible for any memoir of loss…. There is an undeniable burden in being ‘the only one left,’ but there is true grace in the act—and art—of first remembering, then surviving.”

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; 1 edition (April 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586486489
• ISBN-13: 978-1586486488
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,055,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jessica Handler is the author of "Invisible Sisters: A Memoir." She has been the Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellow at the Kenyon Review, and her work has received "Special Mention" for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. "Invisible Sisters" is an Atlanta Magazine "Best of 2009 Must Read" selection.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Clear-eyed and Compelling..., May 5, 2009

By 

Raphael Richman (New York City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Invisible Sisters (Hardcover)

Jessica Handler's "Invisible Sisters" is a clear-eyed, compelling story of the devastation a chance genetic flaw can visit on a brilliant, promising, loving family. The devastation of one rare blood disease followed by another. Cruel and unfathomable anomalies that ultimately ended both her younger sisters' lives and bludgeoned the survivors.

Ms. Handler tells the story of the impact on her sisters, her parents and herself with brutal honesty and the engaging vision of a narrator who sees things as a child, an adolescent, a young woman and finally an adult Someone who is all along trying to find her natural self. Someone who experiences other,'normal' life struggles, like all of us, but someone who, we come to see, can not be like all of us."Invisible Sisters" is by turns joyful, sad, hopeful and tragic. Nonetheless, the book is uplifting, a true tribute to her sisters and her parents, each person stretched as far as he or she could go.

Raphael Richman

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Invisible Sisters, March 25, 2011

By 

Hank Somma - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Invisible Sisters (Hardcover)

Hank Somma, Writer/Photographer, and Facilitator of Writers Of Like Mind, Critique Group. (Dallas, GA)

I am struck by the ease of Jessica's writing, in moving delicately through time, then back again to the present, as if we are sharing her experience while having coffee at Starbucks.
I imagined my blood running through my veins, as tear drops, racing through my body, as Jessica wrote, "I could not save my sisters, but in my journals, I worked to save myself."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars the visible sister's story, September 15, 2010

By 

Patti "PattisPages" (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Invisible Sisters (Hardcover)

I could never write a memoir because, for one thing, I had a relatively normal childhood, and, for another, I didn't keep a journal. However, Jessica Handler did keep a journal and had a very difficult childhood, being the "well" sister. I viewed this book as sort of a memorial to her two younger siblings, Sarah and Susie, who had very different but ultimately fatal diseases. The impact of this tragic coincidence on a family is almost unimaginable, and Jessica Handler documents her family's lives in a rather scattered manner, something like an out-of-order scrapbook. I can't say that this jumbling of events made the book hard to follow, since it's really a very fast read. Thank heavens, because I didn't really want to spend too much time in this household. It's not surprising that young Jessica used drugs and toxic friendships as her escapes from survivor's guilt and the widening chasm between her parents. I was also glad that this book was not as tear-inducing as I thought it would be, since the tone is really rather matter-of-fact. Handler's father is a very intriguing figure, a labor union attorney who moved his family to Atlanta in the 1960s and who had his own demons to face as he struggled to be the head of a family whose members were dying. Her mother appears to be rock solid through all the tragedy, but the failure on the part of both parents to encourage expressions of grief was ultimately destructive to their family dynamic. I'm guessing that pouring out her memories on paper was cathartic for the author, and in the interview in the back of the book she says that she was surprised at how much she laughed while writing it. Needless to say, she doesn't share any of this humor with the reader. Her husband also has a very bizarre story to tell, and their complicated histories draw them together.