Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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?

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!

I wish I would not have wasted my time on this book-there's too many good ones out there! I did not care for any of the characters except for Ray, the forlorn father. The mother was vile. The writer did not help us understand anything about how she felt, how her sister felt, why they did what they did. I can understand running away from their mother, but why prostitution and drugs? They both had other options available. Not at all well written, too much affect.

This is my first review ever written for amazon.com and one I feel forced to write because I just cannot agree with any of the seriously critical and praising reviews of this book. I agree with the only other disappointed reader/reviewer's succinct line for it is truly "A dismal, self-pitying book....." This is, simply put, a cold, voyeuristic glimpse at what passes off as a dysfunctional family memoir. It lacks any insights into the personalities of the parents - it doesn't offer any plausible reasons for the blame the author places on them. The scenes are detailed and sickening, even masterful in the colorful strokes of gore - all too much writing effort placed on describing prostitution and violence in nauseating detail - and no similar but necessary, almost critically urgent, effort placed on even a sincere attempt to understand or explain a single character's motive or feeling. The sisters are chilling in their mutual descent into hell - they even seem to welcome it and the author becomes a mere copycat of her older sister. The only one line that rang even halfway true for me was the mother's, "Whatever you think, I'm not responsible for what happened to any of you." This was definitely a let-down - from the author and critics alike. I must admit I am somewhat curious to read the other works of the author, Maria Flook, just to see if they are of any redeeming value whatsoever. I recommend others not waste their time on this book and to read "Angela's Ashes" instead.

Without a doubt, Maria Flook is a very skilled writer. She writes very vividly, deftly uncovering every little aspect of the story, examining each and every possible layer of an onion, or two. This makes for an interesting read, however with so many onion layers being scrutinized, there becomes too many layers and the book becomes repetitive, full of too much information - some of it nonessential to the story, and by the end of the book, Flook loses focus. I find it ironic that Flook quotes her sister as telling her that she talks too much; she should allow others to paint their own picture. Her sister could not have said it any better. While I did enjoy reading this book, I felt as if I was given a very flat, one-sided view of Flook's life. In some parts, I felt that Flook should have allowed the readers to come to their own conclusions, rather than force feed us with her own interpretations.

This book depicts an ugly underside belly of life. It is not very pretty, but I think that not all writing has to be. The world can be a very ugly place. It's a story about Flook's life, starting at the age of twelve at the time she last saw her older sister step out of the house and disappear. The book starts out great, but by the last page, completely loses focus and the writing style changes, too. I get the feeling that Flook, after having written so much on her story, tires towards the end, and the style becomes much more abbreviated as she attempts to cram everything that she can and ends up essentially listing all the remaining events that happened. Maybe it would have been better to have written two books, instead ... as Mary Karr does with her autobiography in writing her two books, Liar's Club and Cherry. It's an OK read by a writer I believe is talented.

Unlike Patricia Chao's MONKEY KING, Kathryn Harrison's THE KISS, or Mary Karr's THE LIARS' CLUB, Flook's MY SISTER LIFE, an autobiographical account of her life, her sister's life as a child prostitute, and the lives of their parents, have absolutely no one populating the book for whom the reader can feel any compassion. The book goes from self-pitying to self-destructive. It is never clear why, though their mother is Narcissistic and their father is weak, these two women/girls should throw themselves into a life of endless self-destruction and self-degradation. There is not one iota of childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse, or even much emotional abuse to look at for some sort of explanation for the kind of incredibly bored and disaffected descent into hell these two daughters take early on. Possibly the most irritating aspect of the book is that in spite of traumatic events that both sisters literally throw themselves into, there is absolutely no hint of despair or sadness or anguish on the part of either of them; rather, they seem to descend into chaos and brutality with, both of them, a disturbingly lackadaisacal ennui. That critics have found anything at all to praise in this book tells me that they have led sheltered lives indeed, and have found this book in some way thrilling in terms of voyeurism. Rather than being able to compliment the author on a compassionate handling of gratuitous sexual details, I found that the author lists them in all of their gritty detail as if not one of the events in her life, or her sister's terrible life, had any impact on her whatsoever. The reader finds herself exasperated with the author's and her sister's inability to find any meaning in their endless descents into abusive and degrading relationships and lifestyles. Towards the end of the book, one finds oneself practically praying for the last page, and upon finishing it, it is unclear what meaning the author has taken from her own life, if any at all. There is no sense of resolution, and unlike THE KISS, there is not even a sense of a life looked at and evaluated. The end result seems to be the story of three women who selfishly threw their lives away, for no reason that the reader can ascertain or symathize with. Upon finishing this book, which I just purchased at no small expense in its hardbound edition, I packaged it up for resale to a used bookstore, something I never do with books that I find genuinely worthwhile.

A graphic tale of an extremely dysfuncional family--the sister who has fallen from grace, the hyper-sexual mother, a father who is emotionally removed. It is a harsh, cold story--not a pretty picture--but very well written and compelling.

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!

This is a powerful look at what a self-centered mother can bring upon her family. Essentially intelligent, the characters are perceptive and provide novel interpretations of the events of their lives. Yet they lack real personal growth, so as the story progressed, I found myself feeling scorn for each of the females, as they roamed from one self-destructive relationship to another. The feeling that they are idiots persisted through even the denouement. Reading the last third of the book was like being in a theater where you find yourself checking your watch to see how much more of this you must sit through.