My sister life maria flook

Maria Flook's MY SISTER LIFE is a combination memoir/autobiography of her life in a well-off financially but dysfunctional family which consisted of her sister....

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

Maria Flook.

My sister Karen disappeared when she was fourteen years old.

When Maria Flook's fourteen-year-old sister Karen disappeared from their suburban home, the author was changed forever.

Maria Flook's MY SISTER LIFE is a combination memoir/autobiography of her life in a well-off financially but dysfunctional family which consisted of her sister.

A stunning and disturbing book by poet and novelist Maria Flook.

A retelling of the lives of two sisters, separated as young teenagers when each was caught in an undertow of drugs, prostitution, and mental institutions.

Pantheon Books, $25 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-679-44208-0

In 1964 when Flook was 12, her 14-year-old sister, Karen, ran away from their upper-middle-class home in the Wilmington, Del., suburbs, and fell into a life of prostitution and substance abuse.

Soon, Flook herself became a drug-, alcohol- and risk-taking delinquent. The dynamics of a privileged family in which two daughters were propelled into self-destruction by maternal malice and paternal weakness are related by novelist Flook (Family Night) in a searing narrative of astonishing candor.

Her own existence from that moment was irrevocably tainted, and she lived in the shadow of her sister's flight: ""I thought what had happened to Karen could happen to me. I recognized a mysterious `sister life' unfolding parallel to mine.'' She narrates the events in her own downhill slide with harrowing specificity, alternately segueing to Karen's voice, which supplies detail