Morbid Romantic

Book Review & Personal Blog

Title: Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret
Author(s): Steve Luxenberg
Genre: Fiction – Memoir
Finished: July 17, 2009
Rating: 2 Stars

Steve Luxenberg and his siblings always thought their mother Beth was an only child. In fact, they were all but certain of it because she was so adamant to make sure everyone knew that she was. In retrospect, her insistence should have been suspicious, but they all assumed she was just very passionate about that detail of her life. It wasn’t until Beth was in her 80s that they got a call from a doctor who mentioned a sister that had been brought up during a session. Beth had said that this sister of hers, Annie, was sent away when she was two years old because she was disabled. When Steve and siblings hear, they are shocked but can never summon the courage to ask about it. Unfortunately, their mother suffers an injury and passes away, her secret intact. Steve, a journalist by trade and nature, decides to investigate the matter of his secret Aunt. When he finds out that the sister Annie was sent away at twenty-one and lived into her 50s, it opens up all new questions. His mother had an entire life with her sister Annie. It is almost shocking that an entire major aspect of a person’s life can be erased away.

Since Steve can no longer ask his mother to tell him about her sister Annie, he has to rely on other sources. At first it seems a dead end to seek information about Annie, but then Steve receives old patient information that tells him not only about Annie and her condition, but about his mother and his grandparents, too.

It took me about 50 pages to get into this book, but I could tell from the writing in those first few pages that it was going to get good. And it did. As soon as Steve began to unravel details of his secret aunt’s life, I was hooked. Just like he and his sister did, I wanted to know who Annie was and what sort of life she lived, and why everyone wanted to keep her a secret as if she was something to be ashamed of. Annie and Beth lived in a time when people who were mentally ill or disabled were sent away to live in asylums and hospitals, in a time before medication and certain humane regulations were in place.

The story is very beautiful and personal. Not only is it rich in emotion and detail, but it takes you back into history, the Depression era and World War II, as well as describes some of the history of the mentally ill and medical treatment in America. You can tell that Steve loves his family and cherishes his mother. He is desperate the know the whys and hows, and even wants to know if his father knew his mother’s secret. After being so in love and married for years, would it even be possible for her to keep the secret from him? I liked that at times the information about Annie is conflicted and contradictory because it shows you multiple perspectives of who she was. Annie was more than just a woman disabled and ill, she was a real person that was hard for other people to define. After all, when has illness or people in general ever been clean cut and easy to put into a few words? Of course, this means that Annie’s story will never fully be resolved.

If you like memoirs, family history, and small time detective stories or journalists inquiries, you’ll like Annie’s Ghosts.

Also, enjoy this article written by the author about his book:

Memoirs, Movies and Those (Mostly) True Stories
A Writer’s Take on Reality’s Rough Edges
By Steve Luxenberg,
Author of Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret

Why do they do it?

Why do so many film makers put “based on a true story” or some variation as one of their opening frames, when they have freely altered the truth of the story?

Because it works. Because those words retain their mesmerizing power, even though they are misused or stretched at times to the point where there’s little relationship between the story being told and the facts that gave rise to them. Truth-twisting in film has become so accepted that reviewers rarely comment on it or point out the discrepancies between fact and fiction, between information and invention.

As a long-time journalist and a first-time author, I’m probably more fascinated than most people at the transformation of a nonfiction work from book to screen. In researching and writing about a family secret that took me back to the beginning of the 20th century, I chased down many leads to ambiguous and not entirely satisfying conclusions. I joked with friends that I envied the novelist’s license to invent what could not be learned or verified.

I’m not suggesting that there’s a grand deception here. It’s news to no one that movies change certain facts, sometimes for legal and privacy reasons. But film makers increasingly want to have it both ways. What began as a safeguard (“some facts have been changed to protect . . . “) has turned into a genre. Why not just come out and say it? “Some facts have been changed to protect the innocent, streamline the plot and increase dramatic tension. But the story is still (mostly) true.”

Instead, the trend line is moving in the opposite direction. Recent case in point: The Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie as the mother fighting a corrupt Los Angeles police department that had declared a stranger to be her abducted nine-year-old son, begins with the words “a true story” appearing on a black screen, holding for a few seconds, and then fade out.

Not “based on” or “inspired by.” Just that flat, unambiguous statement: “a true story.” Then, in the fine print at the end the closing credits, the film makers fess up. “While this picture is based upon a true story,” we’re told, “some of the characters have been composited or invented, and a number of incidents fictionalized.” In other words, (which I liked and admired for its storytelling as well as its artful re-creation of the 1920s) improved on the remarkable tale of Christine Collins and her young son Walter. The true story wasn’t quite good enough.

Moviegoers seem to accept this hybrid genre, and the industry celebrates it (Oscars, etc.). Is it any wonder that it has crept into the world of nonfiction books, where memoir writers have claimed a license to “fill in the gaps” (based on truth and memory, of course)? Or that universities now offer courses in “creative nonfiction”?

Truman Capote gave us the “nonfiction novel,” stealing a page from the film world. Tom Wolfe chose to take his new journalism into novels, which solved that problem. James Frey obviously crossed the line, however, in embellishing and inventing some of his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces about his drug use and brushes with law. A screenplay version of Frey’s work could have said “a true story,” and no one would have batted an eye.

Subsequent editions of Frey’s memoir have carried an apology from the author that is a model of muddle. “I didn’t initially think of what I was writing as nonfiction or fiction, memoir or autobiography,” he wrote. “I believe, and I understand others strongly disagree, that memoir allows the writer to work from memory instead of from a strict journalistic or historical standard. It is about impression and feeling, about individual recollection. This memoir is a combination of facts about my life and certain embellishments. It is a subjective truth, altered by the mind of a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. Ultimately, it’s a story, and one that I could not have written without having lived the life I’ve lived.”

Frey’s right on one score: Others disagree, and there’s a lively and continuing debate in the writing community about these issues. On a Facebook discussion the other day, for example, the question came up: How far should memoir writers go in reconstructing scenes and dialogue?

I draw a harder line than most. I favor the rough edges of memory over neat and pretty reconstructions. (More interesting, usually.) Invention? As I wrote in the Facebook discussion, that’s why we have novels.

Readers, I think, are smart. They know that most writers don’t have notes or documents to back up dialogue from long ago. So what’s the problem? In a word: Credibility. As a writer, I want readers to grant me some license to tell my story. But if I present lengthy dialogue as fact, I risk losing their trust — and their interest. Bad deal for me.

There’s a scene in my new book, Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret, that illustrates the difficulty of reconstructing past events. I’m at a restaurant outside Detroit, interviewing a cousin about the secret that stands at the center of the book. The secret was my mother’s. Throughout her life, my mom had hidden the existence of a disabled sister. I was trying to find out why. My search had led to my cousin, someone I had never known.

In the early 1950s, I learned, my cousin and my mother had argued about the secret, leading to a life-long rift between the two women. Just as my cousin is recounting a climatic moment in their dispute, we’re interrupted by the waitress’s offer of coffee. After the waitress leaves, my cousin resumes her account — and offers a different (and more dramatic) version of the key moment she had described only seconds before.

I had no doubt about the crux of my cousin’s story. My mother had, after all, kept the secret. But if I wanted an “accurate” version of their conversation, I was out of luck. My cousin was giving me the version that reflected years of thinking about that moment, that reflected her feelings as much as her memory.

“The nuances lie beyond my reach,” I wrote in the book. “Fifty years later, this is the best my cousin can do.”

I saw no reason to choose between the two versions. I would present both, and use the scene to point out the intricate patterns of trouble imposed by time and memory. That would be better than presenting a reconstruction of their argument.

That would be something closer to true.

©2009 Steve Luxenberg, author of Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret

About the author:

Steve Luxenberg has been a senior editor with the Washington Post for twenty-two years, overseeing reporting that has won numerous awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes for explanatory journalism. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

For more information please visit www.steveluxenberg.com

__________
Disclaimer(s):

- More can be found in my Reviews section or on my Biblio page. If you would like to see my book list for 2009, go here.

- If you would like me to review your book, send an email to me at morbidromantic@gmail.com. Read my Book Review Policy for more information.

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