{"id":1696,"date":"2009-07-17T00:05:51","date_gmt":"2009-07-17T04:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/?p=1696"},"modified":"2009-07-16T20:23:22","modified_gmt":"2009-07-17T00:23:22","slug":"annies-ghosts-by-steve-luxenberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/?p=1696","title":{"rendered":"Annies Ghosts by Steve Luxenberg"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Annie's<\/a><\/p>\n

Washington Post associate editor Steve Luxenberg is a master of investigative journalism.\u00c2\u00a0 The editor of two Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Luxenberg has now written his most compelling story: his exploration of his late mother’s secret.<\/p>\n

Beth Luxenberg always claimed to be an only child, but a chance mention led to the discovery that she had been hiding the existence of a sister, Annie.\u00c2\u00a0 The girls had grown up together, living in a series of cramped apartments until Annie’s commitment to a mental institution at the age of twenty-one.\u00c2\u00a0 Why was Annie committed?\u00c2\u00a0 How had Beth so thoroughly erased her sisters existence?\u00c2\u00a0 Why had she wanted to?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s a small blurb from the FSB Associates press release for Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0that gets to the heart of Luxenberg’s questions.\u00c2\u00a0 This is currently\u00c2\u00a0my favorite non-fiction book of the year and should be added to book club reading lists.\u00c2\u00a0 A big thanks goes to Julie at FSB Associates<\/a> for introducing me to this book.\u00c2\u00a0 When I heard Luxenberg’s interview\u00c2\u00a0on NPR <\/a>I found him to be engaging and hoped his writing would be the same.<\/p>\n

Every family has secrets, whether they know them or not.\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes they die with the people who know the secret but in this case Beth Luxenberg’s secret\u00c2\u00a0took\u00c2\u00a0 on a life of its own.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Because\u00c2\u00a0this secret\u00c2\u00a0involves his mother and an aunt he never knew, he has an emotional investment in what he finds.\u00c2\u00a0 Every good detective story has a reliable narrator that tries to make the dots connect and Luxenberg serves that purpose well.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0He doesn’t hold back information to surprise the reader or create shock value.\u00c2\u00a0 If any information is held back it’s because it’s revealed in approximately the same timeline in which he learned it.\u00c2\u00a0 This provides the reader the thrill of what was formerly thought to be a dead end as a new avenue of information.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Edmund Wilson is often quoted with “No two persons ever read the same book” because the reader brings their own experiences and interpretations to a book.\u00c2\u00a0 One of my points of reference while reading this was Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling.\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>Imagine my surprise when Luxenberg used this movie as an example in yesterday’s guest post, but from a different angle.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/em>The main character is institutionalized against her will and meets other women in similar circumstances.\u00c2\u00a0 Luxenberg educates the reader about the Michigan mental health system and changing attitudes towards psychiatry in an interesting way without it being boring or overly technical.\u00c2\u00a0 He sheds light on how a man or woman could find themselves involuntarily admitted into an institution for life.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the last 30 years amazing progress has been made in the fields of psychiatry and orthopedics.\u00c2\u00a0 It gives the reader hope that today’s disabled and mentally ill people have a better quality of life than Annie and makes\u00c2\u00a0the reader sad she\u00c2\u00a0was born before these advances.\u00c2\u00a0 This journey does make Luxenberg evaluate what he knows about his parents.\u00c2\u00a0 Though he can understand his mother’s motivations for keeping her sister a secret he never judges her.\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s one of the main reasons why I like this book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington Post associate editor Steve Luxenberg is a master of investigative journalism.\u00c2\u00a0 The editor of two Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Luxenberg has now written his most compelling story: his exploration of his late mother’s secret. Beth Luxenberg always claimed to be an only child, but a chance mention led to the discovery that she had been… Continue reading Annies Ghosts by Steve Luxenberg<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[170,24,169],"class_list":["post-1696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-annies-ghosts","tag-book","tag-steve-luxenberg","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1696"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1775,"href":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696\/revisions\/1775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amberstults.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}