My Sister Life by Maria Flook
When Maria Flook's fourteen-year-old sister Karen disappeared from their suburban home, the author was changed forever. My Sister Life maps the story of two castaways from American suburbia who, while apart from each other, live mysteriously parallel lives.With unrelenting realism and beguiling wit, Flook gives us an intimate account of her sister's life as a child prostitute, and of their coming of age in the 1960s--that surreal and wrenching moment of baby-boomer disenfranchisement, when the sexual revolution collided with the domestic fallout from the Vietnam War. From the ocean liners and Paris vacations of their refined upbringing to the gritty peepshows and adult theaters where they find jobs, the girls flee from a beautiful and tormented matriarch with secrets of her own.
Her missing sister becomes Flook's secret heroine--the sole example to follow in her journey into womanhood. The sisters live in trailer parks. They are faced with sexual assault, car thefts, and petty crimes with unpredictable men. Escaping from an abusive Vietnam vet, Karen takes her toddler to join her sister, who is herself raising a baby on her own; it is the first time they are under the same roof since their childhood. Their unorthodox reunion allows the sisters to forge a life-saving bond.
My Sister Life moves beyond biography or memoir to give us an astonishing vision of an American family--an authentic testimony to the defiant, undaunted faith between two sisters who connect after years apart.
Flook, Maria: - Maria Flook, a 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award recipient, is the author of the nonfiction books New York Times Bestseller Invisible Eden: A Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod and My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance. Her fiction includes the novels Lux, Open Water, and Family Night, which received a PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation, and a collection of stories, You Have the Wrong Man. She has also published two collections of poetry, Sea Room and Reckless Wedding, winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The New Criterion, TriQuarterly, and More Magazine among others. Maria Flook is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780767903158 |
| ISBN 10 | 0767903153 |
| Title | My Sister Life |
| Author | Maria Flook |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Crown Publishing Group (NY) |
| Year published | 1999-01-05 |
| Number of pages | 368 |
| Prizes | Short-listed for Literary Award (Art of the Memoir) 1999 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |