Book-It 'o13! Book #16
The Fifty Books Challenge, year four! (Years one, two, three, and four just in case you're curious.) This was a secondhand find.
Title: Secret Girl: A Memoir by Molly Bruce Jacobs
Details: Copyright 2006, St. Martin's Griffin Press
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "For decades, a well-to-do Baltimore family guarded a secret they felt too ashamed to reveal, much less speak of among themselves. For one daughter, that secret would haunt her for years but ultimately compel her to take surprising risks and reap unbelievable rewards--the story of which forms the stunning narrative of this remarkable memoir.
When Molly Bruce Jacobs, the family's eldest daughter, finds herself newly sober at the age of thirty-eight, she finally seeks out and comes face-to-face with this secret: Anne, a younger sister who was diagnosed at birth with hydrocephalus ("water on the brain") and mental retardation, was institutionalized. Anne has never been home to visit, and Molly Jacobs has never seen her. Full of trepidation, she goes to meet her sister for the first time. As the book unfolds and the sisters grow close, Jacobs learns of the decades of life not shared and gains surprising insights about herself, including why she drank for most of her adult life. In addition, she gradually comes to understand that her parents' reasons for placing Anne in a state institution were far more complex than she'd ever imagined."
Why I Wanted to Read It: The story was promising and set in Baltimore.
How I Liked It: From the premise, this had the potential to be an immensely gripping book about the shaming of disability. Frame it in the context of wealth and family secrets and you've even got something like a Hollywood blockbuster.
The book starts out strong, building from the author's determination to finally meet the sister hidden from the family. We're taken through the awkwardness of her hunting for presents to give someone she's never met, and builds to an exciting climax of when she and her sister will finally meet.
The book starts stumbling a little when the author leaves out the details, but suggests details are part of further building climax, however rocky. The author describes researching her sister's life before they met, and as such has a biography of sorts from her sister's birth in 1957 and the decision to put her in a home. As Jacobs caveats in a note prefacing the text (at the beginning of the book), some scenes can only be educated guesses, imagined to the best of her ability (and of course there is the usual "distinguishing characteristics" and composite characters). And her ability is pretty decent. She's a gifted storyteller and weaving us through the floundering sadness of her lost sister's early life and her parents' continued decision to shun her from theirs is told in richly and vividly.
She tells her own story as well, counterparting to her sister's experience. This strikes a fine balance and gives a better grasp of the family (especially the parents that kept their distance from their "defective" daughter) up until the author hits puberty. Then, she consumes the book. It ceases to be a story about Anne, the lost sister, and becomes an autobiography of the author who happens to have a sister hidden from the family.
As the author's life expands to fill the entire book with her alcoholism, recovery, therapy, relapse, troubled relationships with her parents, marriage, children, and so on, we're given briefer and briefer glimpses of Anne.
Finally, the climax we've been waiting for (although the author has dropped the ball by now not only by clogging the book with herself and so little of the sister whose story this purports to be, but spoilers of the details of their meeting have tripped up the text), the author finally meets her sister face to face.
Thus begins her relationship with Anne, which the author by now uses more as a cipher to flesh out her own experiences. The nuances of her divorce, her relationships with men (including her therapist), even considerations of her own social skills are examined using Anne as a crutch.
The book peters to a stop rather than ending, and by then is so wrapped up in the author that Anne barely makes a dent in the finish.
It would not be unheard of for the author to have planned a story about her lost sister and had it become her own autobiography with merely her sister as a faint supporting character. But when the author dedicates the book "to all the people whose mental disabilities have precluded them from telling their stories," the book's main focus should remain on Anne, the sister with the mental disability (it could be argued that the author's battle with addiction is a disability, but she's selling the book about her sister, not her alcoholism).
This book could've been so much more that it wasn't, including a better voice for the Annes of the world, and for the systems (both tangible and social) that imprison and segregate them from society.
Notable: Though I didn't expect it to be the focus of the book, I didn't expect so much of the author's life over her sister's to be the focus of the book either, and Baltimore is fairly interchangeable with any other city here. I'd have been interested in hearing more about how the proximity to one of the best hospitals in the world, Johns Hopkins, might have affected the decision of the parents (as upstanding, prominent Baltimore citizens) regarding their daughter's treatment, but it's another angle that was not to be.
Title: Secret Girl: A Memoir by Molly Bruce Jacobs
Details: Copyright 2006, St. Martin's Griffin Press
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "For decades, a well-to-do Baltimore family guarded a secret they felt too ashamed to reveal, much less speak of among themselves. For one daughter, that secret would haunt her for years but ultimately compel her to take surprising risks and reap unbelievable rewards--the story of which forms the stunning narrative of this remarkable memoir.
When Molly Bruce Jacobs, the family's eldest daughter, finds herself newly sober at the age of thirty-eight, she finally seeks out and comes face-to-face with this secret: Anne, a younger sister who was diagnosed at birth with hydrocephalus ("water on the brain") and mental retardation, was institutionalized. Anne has never been home to visit, and Molly Jacobs has never seen her. Full of trepidation, she goes to meet her sister for the first time. As the book unfolds and the sisters grow close, Jacobs learns of the decades of life not shared and gains surprising insights about herself, including why she drank for most of her adult life. In addition, she gradually comes to understand that her parents' reasons for placing Anne in a state institution were far more complex than she'd ever imagined."
Why I Wanted to Read It: The story was promising and set in Baltimore.
How I Liked It: From the premise, this had the potential to be an immensely gripping book about the shaming of disability. Frame it in the context of wealth and family secrets and you've even got something like a Hollywood blockbuster.
The book starts out strong, building from the author's determination to finally meet the sister hidden from the family. We're taken through the awkwardness of her hunting for presents to give someone she's never met, and builds to an exciting climax of when she and her sister will finally meet.
The book starts stumbling a little when the author leaves out the details, but suggests details are part of further building climax, however rocky. The author describes researching her sister's life before they met, and as such has a biography of sorts from her sister's birth in 1957 and the decision to put her in a home. As Jacobs caveats in a note prefacing the text (at the beginning of the book), some scenes can only be educated guesses, imagined to the best of her ability (and of course there is the usual "distinguishing characteristics" and composite characters). And her ability is pretty decent. She's a gifted storyteller and weaving us through the floundering sadness of her lost sister's early life and her parents' continued decision to shun her from theirs is told in richly and vividly.
She tells her own story as well, counterparting to her sister's experience. This strikes a fine balance and gives a better grasp of the family (especially the parents that kept their distance from their "defective" daughter) up until the author hits puberty. Then, she consumes the book. It ceases to be a story about Anne, the lost sister, and becomes an autobiography of the author who happens to have a sister hidden from the family.
As the author's life expands to fill the entire book with her alcoholism, recovery, therapy, relapse, troubled relationships with her parents, marriage, children, and so on, we're given briefer and briefer glimpses of Anne.
Finally, the climax we've been waiting for (although the author has dropped the ball by now not only by clogging the book with herself and so little of the sister whose story this purports to be, but spoilers of the details of their meeting have tripped up the text), the author finally meets her sister face to face.
Thus begins her relationship with Anne, which the author by now uses more as a cipher to flesh out her own experiences. The nuances of her divorce, her relationships with men (including her therapist), even considerations of her own social skills are examined using Anne as a crutch.
The book peters to a stop rather than ending, and by then is so wrapped up in the author that Anne barely makes a dent in the finish.
It would not be unheard of for the author to have planned a story about her lost sister and had it become her own autobiography with merely her sister as a faint supporting character. But when the author dedicates the book "to all the people whose mental disabilities have precluded them from telling their stories," the book's main focus should remain on Anne, the sister with the mental disability (it could be argued that the author's battle with addiction is a disability, but she's selling the book about her sister, not her alcoholism).
This book could've been so much more that it wasn't, including a better voice for the Annes of the world, and for the systems (both tangible and social) that imprison and segregate them from society.
Notable: Though I didn't expect it to be the focus of the book, I didn't expect so much of the author's life over her sister's to be the focus of the book either, and Baltimore is fairly interchangeable with any other city here. I'd have been interested in hearing more about how the proximity to one of the best hospitals in the world, Johns Hopkins, might have affected the decision of the parents (as upstanding, prominent Baltimore citizens) regarding their daughter's treatment, but it's another angle that was not to be.