Books: Journalist explores his family’s ‘ghosts’

Writing in the Washington Post, Barry Werth reviews “Annie’s Ghosts” by Post associate editor Steve Luxenberg.

Luxenberg uses his background as a journalist to construct a “probing, wise and affecting new memoir,” trying to understand why his mother had told her children she was an only child when she actually had a disabled sister who had been institutionalized.

Excerpt: "… Annie Cohen was born in 1919 with a deformed leg and with mental challenges that today would classify her as borderline mentally disabled. The first secret that Luxenberg uncovered — the one that would propel him to dig far beyond Annie’s unhappy life to the “ghosts” of the title — was that she’d been sent away not, as his mother told her social worker, when she was 2 and Beth 4, but after suffering a psychotic break when Annie was nearly 21 and Beth 23, unmarried and still living at home.

Not only had Beth not been an only child … but she also had lived up until adulthood under the same roof as Annie, along with the shame and stigma of having a damaged family member at a time when mental and physical deformities were poorly understood and worried over as darkly hereditary and reflective of everyone in the household."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/15/AR2009051503431.html?wprss=rss_print/style

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/booksmags/bal-ae.luxenberg31may31,0,123406.story

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103820359

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/michigan/news.newsmain/article/0/0/1509548/Michigan.News/Steve.Luxenberg%27s.Quest