10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Generation Gap Revisited, August 20, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: My Sister Life : The Story of My Sister's Disappearance (Hardcover)
O.K. -- This is not a "feel good" read, but it does tell the story of the 1960s collision between the underworld/counter-culture and post-World War II bourgeoisie in the microcosm of this family in a compelling way, which is more than I can say of "The Liar's Club," another dysfunctional family drama.
This book is interesting and important because I think a lot of people don't know, or have forgotten how strange things were back in the sixties. The author seldom analyzes or reflects on the past events from an adult perspective -- the memoir tends to be a reconstructed laundry list of things that happen. Yet I wonder how honest it is, in a way -- the author presents herself as a fearless, daring, self-preserving survivor -- I wonder if this is more how the adult would like to paint herself, rather than how she really was.
Am I the only one who thought that the mother, Veronica, was not only the most interesting character in the memoir, but perhaps the sanest? An early proponent of "tough love", survivor of abandonment in a previous, early marriage, Veronica has no intention of letting her out of control teenage girls upend the life she has struggled to bring to order. To me the girls' behavior has less to do with withheld love, than with a genetic similarity to their mother. Back in the fifties and sixties, the ideal mother was supposed to be self-sacrificing -- the girls' seem to resent her for putting her own needs first. Now women like Veronica are the norm. Quite honestly, she merely had a healthy ego -- I don't see much evidence of emotional abuse,and the parents seem quite generous, financially. After she committs the narrator to the state asylum -- which actually doesn't sound that bad (the girls aren't even drugged, as they would be today, no tales of abuse related) Veronica resourcefully hooks Maria up with book deal calling for poems from jaded teens, launching her literary career. She seems to be trying to do her best,in her own way.
The girls, on the other hand, come off as thwarted Daddy's girls, who would have liked to take their mother's place. All in all, I felt more for the parents than for anyone. What would anyone do with such wild, spoiled girls, in such a volatile social environment?
The author seems to have landed on her feet -- first of all, she had the presence of mind to make an early marriage to an Ivy League heir, then persevere with her creative dreams. The "lost" sister Karen -- I'm sorry, but she seems to have chosen her fate. She seems to glory in her slumming, and by the book's end, seems to resent her younger sister's accomplishments. So many people come into the world with worse families and backgrounds -- to me, Karen is more a casualty of the sixties and her own bad choices than anything else.
Another thing that bothered me -- the author seems to resent that the mother is using the rest of her money on a posh retirement home. Well, if you'd wanted Daddy to leave something to you, you should have had a word with him before. The girls seem to resent their mothers' very existence.
This is an odd book. The author seems to want to elevate Karen and hold the mother up for critique, yet manages to do the opposite, at least to this reader.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another harrowing read, July 18, 2002
By A Customer
I had the same reaction to this book that I had to Janet Fitch's fictional but no less powerful book, WHITE OLEANDER. Both writings are concerned with the hard, dark underbelly of the suburban American Dream. But I definetely had a different reaction to Flook's story than other reviewers here. I don't find her self-pitying at all, but rather in that place where the only way to call the devil by name (which, by the way, is "dysfunctional family") is to just tell the story. And, no, to respond to one reviewer's rhetorical question, I don't think Flook's mother comes off as the sanest person in this sad narrative. Nobody seems to be anything but self-centered, even Flook's sweet but ineffectual father, who seemingly gets his gratification by pretending that his family isn't falling apart around him. Flook uses the metaphor of two ocean liners ramming into each other to describe the calamities within her family. She simply tells it like it was, without reproach, justification or regret. It wasn't every child's family or upbringing--it was hers, and she survived it, didn't she?
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Salacious, yes, but satisfying - hmm?, March 23, 2001
I am ambivalent about this book. It is a page-turner; it is easy to read, and it is salacious. But it is also cold, distant, and doesn't offer anything particularly insightful about motivation or causes of the familial dysfunction, other than the mother's remoteness from her children and the father's diffidence.
I wondered at several times whether this was indeed biography, or just an elaborate fiction, along the lines of an earlier generation's "Go Ask Alice". A bit of Internet research suggests that it is indeed real, and that the author set out with a forensic-like dispassionate intent.
I suppose I had expected something a little bit more personal. I am pleased it does not have the schmaltzy tones of a bad telemovie. It certainly desrcibes in exquisite and distressing detail the processes of mental and physical abuse, but it is all conveyed as a description of a specimen on a glass slide.
Read it, and don't weep - for there is no emotional connection made with this reader, at least!
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