Excellent story, that years later kind of haunts me. ( )

A self serving and mixed up account of the author's sister Anne, who had hydrocephalus, was retarded, and was placed in an institution by her parents. Flash forwards and backwards do nothing to clarify the story of how she became aware of her sister's existence, became an alcoholic, became a lawyer, and stopped drinking after marrying, divorcing, and having two sons. After getting sober she decides to meet Anne. For the first half of the book we don't get an image of what Anne is actually like or how handicapped she is.

Once they spend time together, Anne gets the magical retard treatment, free spirited and honest in a way that the recovering alcoholic author cannot be. She dithers about whether to bring her sister to live in her home, but by the time Anne dies of liver disease, she hasn't seen her in months and her son has died (Googling revealed that he was killed by hyenas on a trip to Africa - http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=10...) And so the story ends with some platitudes about love and forgiveness and how much in common the two had.

The back of the book hinted at further secrets discovered when she researched her sister's life, but they remain secret, as they appeared nowhere in the book. ( )

Decent book. It's a horrifying concept, a family sending a mildly retarded sister away and barely speaking of her. The mother definitely comes off as a bit of a two-dimensional villain, and you can sense the resentment Jacobs has for her on top of that. ( )

Although Secret Girl is a well-written memoir and expose of the immense fallout from trying to keep family secrets, I have difficulty understanding what the purpose was in writing it. Yes, it was common for families to cover up the existence of less-than-perfect babies and many children were institutionalized who today would be welcome and functional members of their families and communities. But Ms. Jacobs' family was so utterly dysfunctional and so replete with one tragedy after another that I fear normalcy is a state she may never attain. At the same time, I can’t blame her. The final tragedy of her son's death, the horrific details of which can be found online, so completely overrode everything that preceded it that the author's alcoholism and inability to see how she has repeated her family’s mistakes are almost understandable.

What gives me the greatest pause with recommending this book is the utter self-involvement of the author, a selfishness handed down by her parents and theirs before them that is sure to be repeated in the present generation of Jacobs’ men and women. Money, southern decorum, and good living has apparently blinded all of them to all but the outer surfaces of life. As much as I enjoyed reading about the author’s freedom to be herself and experience happiness with her retarded sister after almost four decades, I was devastated by the manner in which Ms. Jacobs carried on that relationship. After pages of explanations about how damaging the family’s absence from Anne’s life had been and how much the author wanted to remedy that, Ms. Jacobs saw nothing wrong with, after visiting Anne almost weekly, ignoring her for months or a year at a time. Did she not realize the harm in that inconsistency, an inconsistency that selfishly served only Ms. Jacobs? She seemed so unable to act on her better motives, to the detriment of those around her. Moreover, men come and men go in her life but we never hear what happens to them or why.

For ten years or so, Ms. Jacobs tossed around the idea of having Anne move in with her and her sons. She could easily explain the benefits to everyone of having Anne live with her, the possibility of fulfilling more of Anne’s intellectual potential, of finally giving her a real family, even of giving the author some much-needed focus on issues other than herself, but her discussions never rose above the self-indulgent. What were her reasons for not going through with her plans? She never said. I couldn’t help but believe that if she had made the decision to just do the right thing by Anne, she may have helped Anne live a longer and healthier life. Instead, and even worse, Ms. Jacobs was as absent for Anne’s final years as Anne’s parents had been.

When I read about how Ms. Jacobs’ younger son died (an event so devastating and horrific that Ms. Jacobs could not tell it in her book), I couldn’t help but think his useless death was but another not-so-unexpected outcome of the author’s self-absorption and lack of appreciation for reality. She paid $39,000 for her and her son, then only 11 years old, to go on a month-long African safari, one that was advertised as high risk and very dangerous, a trip that must seem, and rightly so, utterly incomprehensible to any half-way responsible parent. In addition, Ms. Jacobs openly waived any responsibility on the part of the travel agency for anything that might happen on the trip. The record is absent any evidence that her son’s father gave his approval for either the trip or the waiver of liability. She then permitted her young and inexperienced son to sleep by himself in his own tent on the outer perimeter of the campsite, in the open, in the midst of exceptionally wild and dangerous animals. What was she thinking? Where were her priorities? Where was her appreciation of this senseless courting of danger? Where were the protective instincts more rational mothers easily summon for their own children’s safety? Did her ability to just drop $39,000 on a summer trip blind her to her responsibility as a parent?

After finishing this book, I was filled with regret. Regret that the author could not have filled her sister’s life more completely, regret that she never learned to really leave the cocoon of self-indulgence engendered by unlimited money, regret that, although she loved her sons more fully and obviously than her own parents did her, she was not a very responsible parent. If ever there was a parable of how money and superficiality doesn’t buy happiness, this is surely it. ( )

A great concept for a memoir- in her late 30s, the author meets her sister who has been institutionalized her entire life. The execution is not great.
Too much of the memoir is "imagined," as the author overexplains. The re-creations and the author's experiences do not blend together and this reads more like the author's therapy journal than a creative non-fiction piece. ( )