The escape artist / Helen Fremont

Helen Fremont's memoir, After Long Silence, published in 1991 and still very much in print, vividly recounts her discovery in adulthood that her parents were not Catholics, as she thought (having herself been raised in that faith), but Jewish Holocaust survivors living invented lives. Not even their names were their own. In her frank, moving, and often surprisingly funny new memoir, Fremont delves even deeper into the family dynamic that produced such a startling devotion to secret-keeping. She begins her story with the discovery that she has been disinherited in her mother's will, her existence as a member of the family erased, and she writes with unflinching candor about growing up in a household whose members were devoted to hiding the truth. The younger and infinitely more pliant of two sisters, she was affected from early childhood by her family's obsessive focus on the unsteady mental health of her older sister, Lara, and by their alternating bouts of pushing away and demanding loyalty from her, all in service to supporting deep-seated family myths.

English