Behind closed doors

Maria Flook examines parallel lives

by Johnette Rodriguezk

Maria Flook's fiction has been praised for its lean prose, its rough-edged characters, and its unflinching look at what goes on behind the forced smile of the American dream. In a recently-published piece of startling non-fiction, My Sister Life, Flook has turned her writer's tools on her own family -- to lay bare the elements that shaped her parents, her siblings and herself and led to the disappearance of her sister Karen at the age of 14 from their home in Wilmington, Delaware.

Flook, a Roger Williams University graduate and former resident of Newport and Providence, has previously drawn on family stories in her fiction. One of the major plot threads of her first novel, Family Night, was a young man's search for the father he had never met, who had been a model for Arrow Collars, a direct reference to her mother's first marriage and to her stepbrother's obsession about his father. In her first published collection of short stories, Dancing with My Sister Jane, the title story highlights a few of the things she remembered about her sister before she ran away, plus a scene of Karen coming home years later, bringing her tall, black Vietnam-vet boyfriend to meet her parents. And Flook recently found a poem she wrote when she was 18 which was "like a synopsis of this book."

So what pushed a successful writer (NEA fellowship, Pushcart Prize, PEN/American Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation), teacher (graduate writing seminars at Bennington College), and mother of two to air these family skeletons in a more public way? What brought all of this from the back to the foreground of Flook's writing?

"I really couldn't shed it any other way," Flook reflected, in a phone conversation from her home on the Cape. "I had to approach it head-on and address it. When my sister disappeared [Flook was 12 at the time], I started to analyze right then, `What made this happen? Who was responsible? Was I responsible along with my mother and father?' "

Both of her older siblings had left home by the time Maria and Karen were 6 and 8, and the girls were as close as two such sisters would be: they shared a room, teased one another, took trips with their parents to Europe (the last just before Karen left home). Of the two of them, Maria knew that she was favored by their mother, partly because she was more outgoing.

"My sister always deferred to my precociousness," Flook recalled. "She was a lot more reserved and withdrawn. I would step in if there was an extra cookie on the plate and grab it. It wasn't my fault that I was a child who was more able to get the adults' attention, while she retreated. So when she disappeared, I often wondered if she disappeared from me as well as from them."

Flook also wanted to tackle the subject of her and her sister's parallel lives because it was a terrific story, right at her fingertips. "It's a story of my sister's real resilience and survival," she emphasized. "She's the heroine of the story. I think I decided to write it as a book to pledge some affinity to her in a very direct and outward way.

"I also thought it was a story of two sisters who are separated who really reunite," she continued. "Not in the typical way, not in the happy way of sisters on situation comedies, but reunite in a very helpful way to one another. We have a bond coming out of that situation."

That situation was a fierce competitiveness for their mother's attention in the face of her own vanities and her inability to reach out to her children. In looking for perfection in her children, she took Karen's Halloween candy away and tried to get a doctor to prescribe diet pills for her.

"She was threatened by my sister's sexuality -- she was big-breasted at a young age," Flook remembered. "She wanted to destroy it and name it `fat' or something not normal, when it was just normal adolescence."

Karen's solution was to leave at 14; Maria herself was gone by 16. Both ended up in bad relationships with men, but eventually extricated themselves and found men they could trust. Their adventures before that happens are the narrative of My Sister Life.

"Hopefully there won't be a lot of people saying, `Oh, my God, what victims!' " Flook observed. "Because I don't believe that these girls really were victims. Karen was quite defiant in her own way. I think women oftentimes do use their sexuality to elevate them from worse circumstances," she went on. "Some people think that being a prostitute is the lowest choice you can make. But I really think there are worse circumstances, such as starvation, utter poverty, oppression of certain people. It's from desperation that they moor from one thing to another and hopefully to a safety zone."

So Karen's young life of prostitution, confinement to a mental hospital, physical brutality from men and Maria's early rebellion of taking up with a dope dealer at 14 and running away with him, then marrying a preppy college guy at 17 who turned out to be a porn fanatic -- all was grist for Flook's biography.

"I often tell my students, `The truth doesn't make a book -- you have to make a piece of art out of a true event,' " Flook explained, who worked on My Sister Life for two-and-a-half years. "I had to make sure I was religiously faithful to what truly happened but also form and map a story."

Karen and Maria survived the damaging and even life-threatening situations they landed in. They came through intact, saving themselves and their babies (they reunited in their early 20s with toddlers born just three weeks apart). They keep in touch, but mostly on the phone. Their lives have turned out quite differently: Maria is college-educated and better off financially; Karen never finished high school and works in the gambling industry. They've both had another child with their current and long-time mates.

"I hope people will see this as a little bit different than a `tell-all' book," Flook said. "I hope this book has a lot broader, deeper base. It covers not just the 10 years in the lives of the sisters but also the family history of my mother's and my father's previous marriages. It's really a biography of a family."

-- J.R.

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