The Passionate Sister

After a near-fatal overdose and a month in rehab, Ginny asks her son Rob to take her home and help clear out the alcohol from her house. They pour her bottles of wine and gin onto the lawn, then flush her pills down the toilet.

Her older son Jamie and his gay lover Miles come to stay with her, but after Miles is diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, he and Jamie return to Key West, and Ginny faces her recovery alone through a cold and quiet winter in Sag Harbor. In the spring she drives to Rob’s commune in Ohio. There his six-marriage has fallen apart, and Natalia, his original wife, is now pregnant. Later she will give birth to twins. Still on the move, Ginny answers Jamie’s plea for help with Miles, who is losing control of both his speech and muscles. She joins them in Key West, but there is no cure or treatment for Lou Gehrig’s Disease, only a harrowing decline, then death.

When Rob’s wife abandons him, he is left to care for their one-year-old twins, and once again Ginny helps out. The twins both elate and crush her, even as she is courted by Lyle, her first man in years. Though all arousal has vanished for Ginny and she can barely imagine sex with anyone, Lyle is devoted, and slowly she opens up.

In 1981, the two of them drive down to Key West to visit Jamie. It’s the first year of GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, and Ginny is worried about Jamie and his friends, who pay little attention to the disease. A year later she flies down to see Jamie again, still trying to persuade him of the danger. One of his friends has died after a bout with shingles, a disease that can foreshadow autoimmune troubles. In the final chapter, instead of heading off to one of his gay parties, Jamie tracks his mother down on the beach and asks her to look at his chest. When she unbuttons his shirt she finds a band of swollen red bumps, the sure mark of shingles.

Author Biography

John Thorndike grew up in New England, graduated from Harvard, took an MA from Columbia, then lit out for Latin America. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in El Salvador and two, with his wife and child, on a backcountry farm in Chile. Eventually he settled with his son in Athens, Ohio, where for ten years his day job was farming. Then it was construction. His first two books were novels, followed by a memoir, Another Way Home, about his wife’s schizophrenia and his life as a single parent (“The directness, the honesty, the terrible plain chant of the narrative stunned me.”-Doris Grumbach.) A second memoir, The Last of His Mind, describes his father’s year-long descent into Alzheimer’s, and was a Washington Post Best Book of 2009. The novel A Hundred Fires in Cuba follows an affair between a young American photographer and one of the heroes of the Cuban Revolution, Camilo Cienfuegos. The World Against Her Skin is a half-fictional evocation of his mother’s life, and The Passionate Sister gives her ten years she never had.