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My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance
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.
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.
353 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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About the author
Maria Flook
23 books17 followersMaria Flook is the author of the novels Family Night (which received a PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation) and Open Water, as well as a collection of stories, You Have the Wrong Man, and a memoir, My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The New Criterion, TriQuarterly, and More Magazine among others. She is a 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award recipient, and is currently Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston. More information about Maria Flook can be found at www.mariaflook.net.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
June 22, 2018
Four stars means "really liked it" in the GR scale, but "like" is not the emotion this riveting memoir provoked in me. I could not put it down, devoured it in two or three days. It is the most vivid recreation of the late 1950s and 1960s I've ever read, which is obviously more meaningful to someone whose childhood also encompassed those wonderful, funny, peculiar years. The book is loaded with sex, yet it is hard to know whether either Maria or her sister ever actually enjoyed the activity. So My Sister Life is riveting in its strange way, full of the most ordinary of ordinary days and some of the more extraordinary aspects of 20th century American life at the same time. It does remind me that those times were much, much sexier than today's puritannical world. Is it only that that era encompassed my own youth, and thus renders me too subjective; or is there a larger truth in that observation? Going with the latter. Read this and I bet you'll agree!
One of the flaws in the book -- why I give something I read with such devotion only four stars, not five -- is that some of Maria's interpretations of the people in her life did not really agree with the facts she was presenting about their behaviors. The bitter edge to her portrait of her narcissistic and manipulative mother might not be as justified as she thinks, and the lives of the two daughters might not be so much the result of parental mistreatment, as she alleges at times, as simply the genetic inheritance of similar tendencies in a different period. Three fascinating women, each in her own way. Warning, some of the material is pretty downbeat. I didn't always "like" it at all. But this was a rare reading experience for me, lately, and if you also lived through those times, this book will memorably evoke them for you again. It also served as a truthful picture of the whirlwind that our sexuality can produce, in contrast to the nice little boxes of wholesomeness and rationality in which our society today seems to think sex can and should be contained. For better or worse, it just ain't so.
One of the flaws in the book -- why I give something I read with such devotion only four stars, not five -- is that some of Maria's interpretations of the people in her life did not really agree with the facts she was presenting about their behaviors. The bitter edge to her portrait of her narcissistic and manipulative mother might not be as justified as she thinks, and the lives of the two daughters might not be so much the result of parental mistreatment, as she alleges at times, as simply the genetic inheritance of similar tendencies in a different period. Three fascinating women, each in her own way. Warning, some of the material is pretty downbeat. I didn't always "like" it at all. But this was a rare reading experience for me, lately, and if you also lived through those times, this book will memorably evoke them for you again. It also served as a truthful picture of the whirlwind that our sexuality can produce, in contrast to the nice little boxes of wholesomeness and rationality in which our society today seems to think sex can and should be contained. For better or worse, it just ain't so.
May 8, 2017
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 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!
July 30, 2010
A true life story by renowned author Maria Flook. Born of a narcissistic mother who is only interested in living her life with her husband. Veroncia(Their Mom)is a modern day Scarlet who needs the vindication that's she the True Princess in life.
The poor girls Karen & Maria leave home and run away. First Karen who simply walks out then two years later Maria. Prostitution, drugs, and worse. An aching haunted tale of redemption and life.
Don't miss this this wonderful tale and being hooked(No pun intended)on the very first pages.
Engrossing, not to be put down until finished. Five glorious stars for this naked true story in telling us how life is when parents just don't care.
The poor girls Karen & Maria leave home and run away. First Karen who simply walks out then two years later Maria. Prostitution, drugs, and worse. An aching haunted tale of redemption and life.
Don't miss this this wonderful tale and being hooked(No pun intended)on the very first pages.
Engrossing, not to be put down until finished. Five glorious stars for this naked true story in telling us how life is when parents just don't care.
April 22, 2018
I read this book because David Sedaris mentions in in his book “Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002.” It is a memoir written by a woman whose sister runs away at 14, and traces her life and her sister’s through that time and after. (They are eventually reunited, so that’s how she has the information about her sister’s life while she was gone). It was a difficult read, because the sister is prostituted, assaulted, on drugs, etc. And it’s even harder when you remember how young she was. It takes place in the 1970s if I remember correctly, and so has some interesting cultural references. I thought it was OK, but was longer than it needed to be.
June 27, 2014
I read the good ratings and I thought it worth the read. I was disappointed. The family is disjointed, dysfunctional, and seriously depressing. I just didn't know who to feel more sorry for.
December 11, 2010
The central metaphor would be a shipwreck, rather than a train wreck, in this 1997 memoir of growing up in Wilmington, Delaware in the 1960s and early 70s. The Mitchell family was supposed to be returning from Europe on the Andrea Doria, with the two Mitchell sisters assigned to a cabin that went to another pair of sisters when circumstances required the Mitchells change their homecoming plans. In the event, the Andrea Doria famously collided with another ocean liner, the Stockholm, and sank. One of the two sisters in the fateful cabin died; the other miraculously was caught in the damaged prow of the Stockholm. The connection between the Morgan sisters and the Mitchell sisters is one meaning of The Sister Life. The other, less presumptuous and less coincidental in all of its dependencies, is the one between Maria and her older sister, Karen.
It is Karen who suddenly disappears from home when she is 14 and Maria is 12. When Maria is 14 she departs home to look for her sister, whom she knows from a holiday card is in the Virginia Beach area. As she is doing this, Karen, a child prostitute and sex show performer, is calling her older step brother to come and get her. Maria’s escape/rescue is subverted by her means, riding in a stolen car that speeds dramatically through Baltimore while the police give chase resulting in a spectacular crash that puts Maria in police custody in a hospital. From her sister’s initial disappearance to the book’s end, when the two sisters briefly live together in seaside cottage in New England, the book is a story of Maria’s flirtation with the underclass and her sister’s immersion into it—welfare, child services, pimps, drug addict best friends, petty crime and worse.
It is also a mostly implied indictment of the two girls’ mother, a beautiful, narcissistic woman who had been abandoned by a more narcissistic first husband, the Arrow Shirts model. If the Mitchell girls’ childhood is the Andrea Doria; Mom, Veronica, is the Stockholm. When Karen returns home, Veronica has her husband and Karen’s father immediately dispatch her to a mental hospital, where she resides for many months. How immediately? Ray must drop Karen off on her way to rescue Maria from the hospital and police custody. The two sisters don’t get to see each other. A few years later when Maria runs off again, this time to NY, Ray picks her up when bad things happen to her, including a rape. He arrives with Karen’s bag packed for the same mental hospital where her sister had stayed. Veronica isn’t welcoming the runaway home, not even for a night. Why Veronica is such a mess of a mother is not fully explored, though largely ascribed to her belief that having her first two children led to her first husband’s abandonment of her. So she was completely devoted to Ray and wouldn’t let her attention be distracted by their two daughters. But this, even if true, only explains so much and doesn’t say anything about Ray’s hapless abetting of it. Nor does mere selfishness and aloofness explain the choices the daughters make, just their drift.
Flook argues that her sister’s disappearance impacted her in major ways, one of which was her own mirroring of some of her sister’s behaviors and circumstances—both sisters run away, are raped, fall in with criminals, treat sex as a means to dubious ends, indulge in drug and alcohol abuse, have children at about the same time, cling to abusive boyfriends. The other way Flook was impacted by her sister’s disappearance is related to the mirroring. Flook becomes a witness, an observer, which, along with her talent, lead to her becoming a writer, poet, novelist, journalist. She is a very good writer, a very observant one and a very frank one. But beyond an extremely dramatic story told with little, if any, emotional adornment, I’m not sure what to make of My Sister Life. What happened is clear; why it happened is not at all clear.
I’m happy that the sisters survived and are apparently doing well but don’t really understand their story, or, for that matter, their relationship. Karen jabs at her sister when they do eventually come together here and there, for being better educated and more bookish and a thinker, for pretending to go where Karen has gone. So I for one would like to know what Karen made of Maria’s first person account of Karen’s Virginia Beach life/ordeal, living with a violent punk-ass pimp and her more professional but also more exploitive and manipulative and ruthless madam, turning tricks, fellating a Shriner on stage in a theater full of Shriners, being raped by a father and son pair of evangelical preachers after her supposed rescue from her street life. Karen’s parts of the story after her disappearance are told in the third person but the time of disappearance is in the first person. A daring and convincingly done narrative but a mysterious one as well. Flook is a great witness but not one who for all her frankness reveals much.
It is Karen who suddenly disappears from home when she is 14 and Maria is 12. When Maria is 14 she departs home to look for her sister, whom she knows from a holiday card is in the Virginia Beach area. As she is doing this, Karen, a child prostitute and sex show performer, is calling her older step brother to come and get her. Maria’s escape/rescue is subverted by her means, riding in a stolen car that speeds dramatically through Baltimore while the police give chase resulting in a spectacular crash that puts Maria in police custody in a hospital. From her sister’s initial disappearance to the book’s end, when the two sisters briefly live together in seaside cottage in New England, the book is a story of Maria’s flirtation with the underclass and her sister’s immersion into it—welfare, child services, pimps, drug addict best friends, petty crime and worse.
It is also a mostly implied indictment of the two girls’ mother, a beautiful, narcissistic woman who had been abandoned by a more narcissistic first husband, the Arrow Shirts model. If the Mitchell girls’ childhood is the Andrea Doria; Mom, Veronica, is the Stockholm. When Karen returns home, Veronica has her husband and Karen’s father immediately dispatch her to a mental hospital, where she resides for many months. How immediately? Ray must drop Karen off on her way to rescue Maria from the hospital and police custody. The two sisters don’t get to see each other. A few years later when Maria runs off again, this time to NY, Ray picks her up when bad things happen to her, including a rape. He arrives with Karen’s bag packed for the same mental hospital where her sister had stayed. Veronica isn’t welcoming the runaway home, not even for a night. Why Veronica is such a mess of a mother is not fully explored, though largely ascribed to her belief that having her first two children led to her first husband’s abandonment of her. So she was completely devoted to Ray and wouldn’t let her attention be distracted by their two daughters. But this, even if true, only explains so much and doesn’t say anything about Ray’s hapless abetting of it. Nor does mere selfishness and aloofness explain the choices the daughters make, just their drift.
Flook argues that her sister’s disappearance impacted her in major ways, one of which was her own mirroring of some of her sister’s behaviors and circumstances—both sisters run away, are raped, fall in with criminals, treat sex as a means to dubious ends, indulge in drug and alcohol abuse, have children at about the same time, cling to abusive boyfriends. The other way Flook was impacted by her sister’s disappearance is related to the mirroring. Flook becomes a witness, an observer, which, along with her talent, lead to her becoming a writer, poet, novelist, journalist. She is a very good writer, a very observant one and a very frank one. But beyond an extremely dramatic story told with little, if any, emotional adornment, I’m not sure what to make of My Sister Life. What happened is clear; why it happened is not at all clear.
I’m happy that the sisters survived and are apparently doing well but don’t really understand their story, or, for that matter, their relationship. Karen jabs at her sister when they do eventually come together here and there, for being better educated and more bookish and a thinker, for pretending to go where Karen has gone. So I for one would like to know what Karen made of Maria’s first person account of Karen’s Virginia Beach life/ordeal, living with a violent punk-ass pimp and her more professional but also more exploitive and manipulative and ruthless madam, turning tricks, fellating a Shriner on stage in a theater full of Shriners, being raped by a father and son pair of evangelical preachers after her supposed rescue from her street life. Karen’s parts of the story after her disappearance are told in the third person but the time of disappearance is in the first person. A daring and convincingly done narrative but a mysterious one as well. Flook is a great witness but not one who for all her frankness reveals much.
February 8, 2008
This book has an interesting premise - to find out about the author's sister's disappearance in 1964 when she just walked out of their lives at the age of 14. Her sister came back unannounced one day two years later. Both sisters were put into mental institutions by their parents for really unspecified reasons - some drug use and sex. These sisters had parents that basically spoiled them materially in lieu of having to interact with them. The mother was very sexual, always flirting and coming on to men according to the author. And for this, the author blames her mother for all of her problems. The author never blames herself for her problems - she also feels her mother spent all of their money on herself and that is one reason she and her sister are only lower middle-class today. I did enjoy reading about working in a peep show and as a prostitute. I personally feel these women need to go see a good therapist and work their issues out and not to have published their reactions to their parents, especially considering the father is dead and I suspect now the mother is too. While reading it, I truly enjoyed the trash part of the book but hated all of the blame part.
May 10, 2007
Anyone who complains about her mom should read this. It could be much worse.
May 13, 2019
3.5, but can't go beyond that. Well done, but such a harsh read. The subject matter was difficult and too close to home for what my own family of origin suffered from, though this was cartoonish in it's extreme dysfunction. And it's a memoir that I can only grimace at knowing Maria and her sister lived these stories. The unsavory trailer park trash and sex work young Karen was caught up in went on too long for my taste and the book could have benefited from more current day good news. Less grime and more rising from the ashes. A hard story to tell, a harder one to live through. I applaud Maria for making a better future for herself. I'm curious about her poetry.
March 1, 2018
Really well written, but not at all what I expected. A little too much gritty life honesty for me (I had to stop reading a few times) and I never really got how the mother was so bad that it could motivate what happens to these girls. But overall the great writing kept me engaged.
October 31, 2020
One of those books that you can't associate the word "like" with; terribly disturbing and haunting. And true. But her writing...if it wasn't for her talent with words, I wouldn't have been able to make it thru this one.
May 25, 2017
I liked it. Not sure I believed it all or fully understand how these sisters got so jaded, but it was very interesting.
September 1, 2017
a unique dark memoir, with a narrative style you don't really see ver often
November 15, 2020
2.5. Bored by the end.
August 23, 2007
A chilling look into the reality of Flook’s childhood and her sister’s experiences. Piercing. I picked this up because I enjoyed her book Invisible Eden, a non-fiction narrative about the murder of Christa Worthington.
February 18, 2015
This was such a good book. I struggled to put it down. How the lives of these two sisters intertwined was amazing. The very first few chapters were a little slow, but I was glad that I stuck through those as the journey the author took me on was well worth it. Sad story, but gripping.
July 4, 2012
Interesting read. I always enjoy autobiographies no matter what the content. It's always fascinating to me to have a window into someone else's life and I can always learn a little something.
December 7, 2008
A sad story about the strangness of families.
May 27, 2009
Awful, even from the totaly trashy, self-indulgent, tell-all standpoint.
April 26, 2016
After reading 25% of the book, I had to quit. I really don't need to know what goes on in houses of adult entertainment. Too much information.
January 23, 2016
Beautifully written, but gritty and at times depressing true story of the sometimes-parallel lives of two sisters. This one will stay with me.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews