From the author of Bough Down, a found, collaged and lovingly
amended inquiry into how women disappear
Artist and writer Karen Green's second book originated in a search for a
woman who had vanished: her Aunt Constance whom Green knew only from a
few family photos and keepsakes. In her absence, Green has constructed
an elliptical arrangement of artifacts from an untold life. In this
rescued history, Green imagines for her aunt a childhood in which she is
bold, reckless, perspicacious, mischievous; an adolescence ripe with
desire and scarred by violation and loss; and an adulthood in which she
strives to sing above the incessant din of violence.
Constance--one half of a sister duo put to work performing as musical
prodigies in the dirt-poor town of Oil City, Pennsylvania. during the
Great Depression--escapes as a teenager to the USO and tours a ravaged
Italy during World War II. Soon after she returns to an unsparing life
in New York City, she disappears. Green traces her dissolution in a
deftly composed trove of letters Constance writes to her beloved sister
and those she receives from dozens of men smitten by her stage persona,
along with her drawings, collages and altered photographs.
Though told mostly from Constance's point of view, Frail Sister is
also haunted by the voices of the transient, the absent and the dead.
The letters (a few real, many invented) expose not only the quotidian
reality of war but also the ubiquitous brutality it throws into relief.
Nimble, darkly funny and poignant, Frail Sister is possessed by the
disappeared, giving voice to the voiceless, bringing into a focus a life
disintegrating at every edge.
