When photographer Bettina Flitner learned of her beloved sister’s suicide, her initial reaction was shock, paralysis, and despair. But then she decided to write about it in order to come to terms with her grief. The result is a deeply moving, masterful text, a book of liberation.
With the unerring gaze of a trained photographer, with devotion, wit, and sorrow, Bettina Flitner writes about the intimate relationship between siblings, a childhood in the 1970s, memories of their charismatic grandparents and their glamorous but unhappy parents. And she writes about the cracks: children overburdened by their parents’ sexual libertinism, their mother’s flight into depression, the parents’ unattainable career expectations for their daughters.
Bettina Flitner’s book is an admirably brave step towards confronting and freeing herself of the ghosts of her and her sisters’ shared past, allowing her to come to terms with the death of loved ones. A book about a subject that is still taboo and buried in silence for many.
