Praise for My Sister's Continent:
Soon to be married, Kirby dreads the return to Chicago of her twin, Kendra, a ballerina. So severe is Kirby's stress-induced intestinal malady, her father sends her to his shrink. Kendra is even more of a wreck: a back injury has ended her dancing life, leaving this anorexic, pill-popping sexual outlaw perilously at loose ends. But their father trumps all: he has AIDS. Under all this duress, Kirby begins to question her engagement and her sexuality, and Kendra, a devotee of pain, takes up with a colleague of her father's proficient in sadomasochism. The adventurous editor of the literary magazine Other Voices, Frangello has parlayed Freud's vision of female sexuality as a "dark continent" into a boldly explicit debut novel in which high-strung characters struggle to decode the mysteries of the self while their bodies express what their minds repress. Frangello is uncanny and mesmerizing in this smart, suspenseful psychosexual drama as she choreographs traumatic, possibly criminal family dynamics, and delves fearlessly into questions of identity, abuse, power, trust, trespass, and delusion.
Donna Seaman, Booklist
“My Sister's Continent, by Gina Frangello, executive editor of Chicago's Other Voices magazine and its imprint, OV Books, takes on another missing person. Narrator Kirby's twin sister has returned to Chicago from New York and disappeared, and the family's psychoanalyst has written a case study about it, one that parallels Freud's seminal study of Dora. The novel is Kirby's attempt to imagine her sister's life in opposition to such master narratives, a direct response to the psychoanalyst's representation of her family and herself. This framing device would overwhelm a lesser writer, but Frangello handles it with a light touch, deftly interweaving Kirby's fiercely resistant intelligence and deeply felt humor. The novel's many laughs are a refreshing rebuttal of the canard that feminism is humorless, and the deep pun in the title is priceless.”
Chicago Tribune
Since finishing up Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place, I have left half finished books all over my apartment. Everything I started to read paled in comparison, and I started to get itchy, thinking I would never again find a book worth reading. (I go through this every time I read Elizabeth Bowen, too.) Then I picked up Gina Frangello's My Sister's Continent. Holy shit, people. I should have picked it up immediately after reading The Thin Place, because it's like that book's sister. But while Davis's book is all cut glass and beautiful, Frangello's is dark and sticky. Yesterday I realized I was trying to hold my breath through one of the sex scenes (although technically there was no sex in the scene, just an unfortunate use of freshly boiled tea). I just knew when I came across the Kathy Acker fragment "If you can't be it, fuck it," this book would be mine forever.
Jessa
Crispin, www.bookslut.com
"Gina Frangello brings a mountain of intelligence to her first novel..."
The Chicago Reader
“Gina Frangello writes about sex, psychology and sisterhood with a rare
sensitivity and tremendous wit.
This is a
delightful novel, full of rollicking scenes and uncanny wisdom.”
Steve Almond, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow
“My
Sister’s Continent is brilliant and timely—readers who find themselves bored
and de-sensitized by the recent deluge of shock-value lit will be blindsided by
this truly disturbing and undeniably
germane piece of work. Frangello’s
portrayal of sexual exploration as a ceaselessly striving thing is harrowing,
but the spankings, whippings and bindings here are only one strand in this chord
of inseparably inter-twisted stories.
The power issues at work between women and men and family today are bared
three-dimensionally here, and Frangello’s only agenda is honesty. The results are stunning, and readers
will come away from this book changed.”
Don De Grazia, American Skin
“In My Sister’s Continent, Gina Frangello
has written a contemporary female counterpoint to Freud’s well-known case study
of “Dora,” refuting reductive notions of personality while affirming the
timelessness of our struggle to understand the mysteries of identity, sexuality
and family dynamics. The novel is
intriguing in its conception, weaving together a series of accounts and
imaginings into a kind of psychological detective story that draws readers into
a web of complex relationships and secrets. This is a thought-provoking, very smart
and suspenseful book.”
Dan Chaon, Among the Missing and You Remind Me of Me
“What writer doesn’t envy the great
novelist Sigmund Freud’s invention of the unconscious? Currently, I envy the splendid new
novelist, Gina Frangello, who has re-invented Freud in My Sister’s Continent, a complex complex
of a book, a depth-ridden rendition of the contemporary world. Conscious or un, hers is a breakthrough
achievement.”
Michael Martone, The Blue Guide to Indiana (author) and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction (editor)
“My
Sister’s Continent is a slow burn that slices deep beneath the skin. This
book agitated me as I read it; infiltrated my sleep, haunted my dreams; it
clings to me still, long after having finished it. With great finesse, Frangello
lets her story grow—lusciously, seductively, disturbingly—to a truly unsettling
crescendo. In this intimate portrait of a family, of two contentious, enmeshed
sisters we learn what drives their sexuality, morality, self-perceptions. But as
is true of the best fiction, that which we feel we are watching from a safe
distance grows beyond the bounds of the story and, without our notice, unwraps
us with its insights, implicating us and laying bare our own
desires.”
Ian Chorão, Bruiser
“In this brave novel, Gina Frangello’s narrative
about a
Rose Rappoport Moss, The Family Reunion (short-listed National Book Award)
“In My Sister’s Continent Gina
Frangello’s characters talk postmodern trash, the ids of Kirby and Kendra
battling the psychological landscape of sex and siblings and turning Freudian
theory on its head. The sharp prose here will sting you like a slap.
This is an edgy, compelling, brightly dark first novel that I couldn’t put
down.”
Lisa Glatt, A Girl Becomes A Comma Like That and The Apple's Bruise
“My
Sister's Continent is one beautiful kick in the teeth: deftly-written,
aggressively-sharp, compulsively-hard-to-resist, this novel limns the shadow
world of secret and not-so-secret desire, exposing the dangerous, knotty ends of
impulse and longing. Gina Frangello’s wonderfully addictive prose radiates with
real heat.”
Joe Meno, How the Hula Girl Sings and Hairstyles of the Damned
“In My Sister's Continent, Gina
Frangello has added unusual and compelling insights into feminist “hot button”
topics—bulimia, incest, AIDS—steering them off well-worn tracks and into new,
sometimes treacherous territory.”
Cris Mazza, Is It Sexual Harrassment Yet? and Disability
“In this reworking of Freud's famous case study, a modern-day Dora exacts her revenge, plunging the analyst-reader into a phantasmagoria of neurosis, psychosis, and hysteria which defies resolution or cure. A chilling post-mortem of the Freudian Century.”
Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl
After her twin sister's mysterious disappearance, narrator Kirby Braun responds to a therapist's mistaken diagnoses of her family -- laden with sexual secrets and feminine angst -- by carefully piecing together details from Kendra's life. While sifting through memories, Kirby muses, "How do I tell the story of a life...that is outside my own experience, wrapped in shatterproof glass and secrets that have everything to do with me?"
While Kirby is complacent and domestic, Kendra was passionate and bohemian. Devastated after an injury ended her promising career at the New York City Ballet, Kendra returned to family in Chicago only to become increasingly withdrawn before disappearing entirely. Though Kirby was considered the "good" twin, she is inwardly troubled: no career, a banal sex life and health problems that become a serious threat to her wedding plans.
It is difficult to deal with female sexuality without exploring issues of body, consumption and purging (of food, thoughts, memories), and the novel's strength is how intricately these themes are linked. Between Kirby's digestive troubles and Kendra's depression, both girls lose weight rapidly, mirroring one another's bodies even while their personalities conflict.
Kendra's sadomasochistic relationship with an older man functions as a "therapy of humiliation," and it is in these scenes that Frangello's lush and poetic style is at its most lyric. The cat-and-mouse style of their coital dialogue is an annoying but necessary device in conveying their sex games, and during one particularly sophisticated conversation, Kendra muses, "I prefer my sex less civilized and urbane than this cigarette-lighting Noel Coward routine you call being direct."
Frangello's debut novel is akin to a woman's archaeological dig into another life, as well as a modern retelling of Freud's famed "Dora" story. As such, it cannot help but be reather bleak, evoking a similar anomie as The Ice Storm and The Virgin Suicides. It is also an intriguing and darkly psychological look at and investigation of identity, the facades that cloak us and the complicated habitat of private, inner lives.
Gretchen Kalwinski, Time Out Chicago
Copyright © 2005 Gina Frangello. All Rights Reserved.