Karen Green: Frail Sister - (Hardcover)

About the Book

Artist and writer Karen Green's second book originated in a search for a woman who had vanished: her Aunt Constance whom Green knew only from a few family photos and keepsakes. In her absence, Green has constructed an elliptical arrangement of artifacts from an untold life. In this rescued history, Green imagines for her aunt a childhood in which she is bold, reckless, perspicacious, mischievous; an adolescence ripe with desire and scarred by violation and loss; and an adulthood in which she strives to sing above the incessant din of violence. Constance is one half of a sister duo put to work performing as musical prodigies in the dirt-poor town of Oil City, Pennsylvania. during the Great Depression. She escapes as a teenager to the USO and tours a ravaged Italy during World War II. Soon after she returns to an unsparing life in New York City, she disappears. Green traces her dissolution in a deftly composed trove of letters Constance writes to her beloved sister and those she receives from dozens of men smitten by her stage persona, along with her drawings, collages and altered photographs. Though told mostly from Constance's point of view, Frail Sister is also haunted by the voices of the transient, the absent and the dead. The letters (a few real, many invented) expose not only the quotidian reality of war but also the ubiquitous brutality it throws into relief. Nimble, darkly funny and poignant, 'Frail Sister' is possessed by the disappeared, giving voice to the voiceless, bringing into a focus a life disintegrating at every edge.

Book Synopsis

From the author of Bough Down, a found, collaged and lovingly amended inquiry into how women disappear

Artist and writer Karen Green's second book originated in a search for a woman who had vanished: her Aunt Constance whom Green knew only from a few family photos and keepsakes. In her absence, Green has constructed an elliptical arrangement of artifacts from an untold life. In this rescued history, Green imagines for her aunt a childhood in which she is bold, reckless, perspicacious, mischievous; an adolescence ripe with desire and scarred by violation and loss; and an adulthood in which she strives to sing above the incessant din of violence.

Constance--one half of a sister duo put to work performing as musical prodigies in the dirt-poor town of Oil City, Pennsylvania. during the Great Depression--escapes as a teenager to the USO and tours a ravaged Italy during World War II. Soon after she returns to an unsparing life in New York City, she disappears. Green traces her dissolution in a deftly composed trove of letters Constance writes to her beloved sister and those she receives from dozens of men smitten by her stage persona, along with her drawings, collages and altered photographs.

Though told mostly from Constance's point of view, Frail Sister is also haunted by the voices of the transient, the absent and the dead. The letters (a few real, many invented) expose not only the quotidian reality of war but also the ubiquitous brutality it throws into relief.

Nimble, darkly funny and poignant, Frail Sister is possessed by the disappeared, giving voice to the voiceless, bringing into a focus a life disintegrating at every edge.

Review Quotes

integrate[s] a nuanced literary voice, a rigorous visual aesthetic, and an entire life story into a masterwork.--Ryan Chapman "The Believer"

[Green] is honoring the lives of so many other lost and forgotten women.--Elissa Schappell "Tin House"

An ambitious collage attempting to place the reader within an imagined consciousness--typically the provenance of prose literature.--Ryan Chapman "The Believer"

Frail Sister is not simply a graphic narrative made up of a compelling art form -- it is a song, a dirge, a mystery, and a tragic lark.--Elaine Sexton "On the Seawall"

Those artifacts are both found and made--we readers mostly don't know which--and are all over each other in every manner of letter, photograph, clipping, drawing, and diagram, making the book like a biographical archive ordered by chronology and collaged into lucid disorder.--Adam Plunkett "Art in America"

What a beautiful, strange book -- found objects and fictional prose brought together to tell the real and imagined story of Constance Gale, through letters to her sister, letters from young men at war. From the beginning to the end of the book, we bear witness to a life, too-short but fully-lived. This is simply fascinating and gorgeously written, gorgeously assembled.--Roxane Gay "Goodreads/Twitter"

Frail Sister is a singular achievement that defies genre naming. Here image is formed by epistolary text which is informed by the unformed facts of actual lives reformed by fiction. Sisters in life and the men who admire, cajole or destroy them stand in for every woman who has felt missing, gone missing, found dead. If there must be a question at the center of every breath, Frail Sister asks what it is to "faint upwards" or "float and fall" in the same moment. This is a masterwork creating its own terms for existence--every page a marvelous and terrifying journey.--Claudia Rankine

Glorious, a haunting prism of art and artifact, Frail Sister builds its power as a mystery does, with clues and secrets, the story inseparable from the form. Moving, sly and skillful, a portrait of woman's life in the embodied history of its materials. A marvel.--Janet Fitch

Karen Green smashes the boundaries between the visual and the written, the found and the invented, the comic and the tragic; between uncompromising art and pure fun. Her ear is as keen as her eye is dazzling. And her obsessions are contagious.--Jonathan Franzen