The Book of Atlantis Black by Betsy Bonner

Some of us live our lives on the edge of the vortex.  It takes every ounce of strength to hang on and not be pulled into the abyss.  That is Betsy Bonner’s struggle in the story of her sister’s all-too-brief life and the black hole she left when she mysteriously disappeared in The Book of Atlantis Black:  The Search for a Sister Gone Missing (Tin House Books, 2020).

The memoir begins and ends with a body; the first is that of a young woman who may or may not be Eunice Anne Bonner, also known as Nancy, also known as Eunice Anne Black, also known as Eunice Atlantis Black.  She is found in a hotel room in Tijuana with Atlantis’s passport and California driver’s license.  The physical description does not match exactly; however, her mother believes it is Atlantis.  Mexican authorities cremated the body before a positive identification could be made with fingerprints or dental records.  The second body is that of the mother, herself a suicide with multiple drug toxicities in the final pages of this harrowing account.

Bonner must be lauded for drilling down into the depths of this story.  There are wounds beneath wounds here, scabbed over and painful, but she reveals herself to be a valiant and fearless writer.  This is a book about wreckage, about losing someone even while making every effort to hang on to them, to save them.  It is an unsolved mystery in that there is little closure here, if such a thing exists.  Most likely, based upon her mother’s reaction to seeing the body, it is Atlantis in the Tijuana morgue.  Hard living and dying render the dead unrecognizable.  Bonner writes that if it is not her sister, she has never surfaced.  She has never reached out.  The sisters had a pact to meet in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris should Atlantis’ numerous run-ins with the law ever force her to flee the country.  Bonner has no desire to go there after Atlantis disappears.  There has just been too much—too much pain, suffering, and exhaustion.

That is one of the things the reader feels the most in this memoir:  exhaustion.  One sees the impact on the family.  The Bonner household is not an easy one to inhabit:  a strict, Catholic father who beat his eldest daughter; a bipolar mother who is often drugged; and Betsy, who avoids her father’s hand and is often considered the older sister even though she is two years younger than Nancy, as she is called in childhood.  The adult Atlantis’ actions often reflect on the other family members, and they struggle to understand her mania.  Betsy is the achiever, the one who excels despite the conflagration at home.  She is left to pick up the pieces after their father dies, and her mother and Atlantis become more and more out of control.  Betsy tries to clean up the mess after Atlantis’ disappearance when the vultures circle trying to steal away her sister’s music rights and the few other assets she has at the time of her disappearance.  Her strength is epic.

Atlantis was a musician and performer.  She lived for her compositions and performances.  Bonner writes that she “believed that the demons possessing Atlantis would kill her if she didn’t perform.”  There is plenty of testimony to this in the book.  Atlantis’ music is still on YouTube; her song “Ophelia” is dark and foreboding with raspy vocals and droning guitar chords.  Her music is not easy to listen to, full of despair and the black dog of depression.

Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where the girls grew up, is also the home of painter Andrew Wyeth.  Bonner makes this connection early in the memoir.  Much of her imagery parallels Wyeth’s work, the bleak, stark country and its menacing, forlorn characters.  These are the faces of lonely people, eyes that look out with fear and wariness.  His brushstrokes highlight the banality, the frigid landscape of emptiness.  Atlantis seemed destined to escape this bleached country; both girls travel far in their lives to escape the muted context of small-town Pennsylvania.  There are numerous incidents and references to abuse—sexual, physical—by people who prey upon others, especially children.

All of these episodes, the manic behavior, the home life of instability, impact Atlantis and Betsy.  The value in such a bleak story is to tell it true, as Bonner so effectively does.  She does not cave to emotion.  She is clear-eyed in her details, many of which are hard to take in.  She asks the morgue for a lock of her sister’s hair and receives it with a piece of scalp still attached, already green with decomposition.

Betsy Bonner’s thesis comes at the very end of her memoir.  “I never tried to meet my sister at the Louvre,” she tells us, “because I knew she wouldn’t—couldn’t—be there.  And I also dreaded that she might actually show up.  If she were still alive in the year I write this, she’d be forty-two.  But she’ll be thirty-one forever,” her age at the time she disappeared.  Bonner goes on to deliver her epiphany in all of this:  “My own life has been shaped by what I inherited:  most of all, my sister’s story.  I’m still living off of her fortune.”  This is what it means to live life until all that remains are the stories we leave behind and the ashes of our annihilation.