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THE BOOK OF ATLANTIS BLACK by Betsy Bonner

THE BOOK OF ATLANTIS BLACK

The Search for a Sister Gone Missing

by Betsy Bonner

Pub Date: Aug. 4th, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947793-77-4
Publisher: Tin House

When a troubled young musician disappears, her sister searches for something more profound than answers.

In her debut memoir, poet and educator Bonner reflects not only on her sister Nancy’s (she renamed herself Atlantis Black) disappearance, but also on the shadows that have haunted her family. What begins with a resume of the sisters’ youth transforms into a psycho-thriller murder mystery with a charmingly unreliable narrator. The author lays the blame for her sister’s mental illness, the root of her demise, unambiguously on their father’s abuse, their mother’s manic depression, and the sexual entitlement of the boys at school. Wrought in unsentimental, candid prose, the depictions of their childhood showcase Bonner’s poetic sensibilities, as she displays powerful control over imagery, suspense, and irony. As the girls matured, the author achieved a high level of education, professional success, and some stable relationships. Meanwhile, Atlantis revealed only glimpses of her precarious existence to her sister. Shady characters, illegal activity, drug abuse, and financial desperation pepper their correspondence, which Bonner intersperses through the primary narrative. Atlantis’ voice, rich with suffering and paranoia and tender with love and vulnerability, lives on through this dramatic memoir. The author clearly tried to strike a delicate balance between helping without derailing her own life, being supportive without enabling, and living fully without abandoning a needy loved one. The secrets of Atlantis’ life eventually became a chasm in which Bonner began to lose her stable sense of reality. By the end, the lucky sister has begun to embody some of her female relatives’ instability, and she constantly questions herself. She believes, at least partially, the official story of Atlantis’ drug-related death in Tijuana, and while she does want to know what happened, she’d prefer to know why and how it could have gone differently.

Carefully crafted, haunting, and absorbing, this thrilling memoir echoes in the head and heart long after the final page.