About MAD SISTERS
In 1962 eight-year-old Nancy saves her little sister, Susie, from drowning in a swimming pool. Five years later, Nancy is diagnosed with a severe mental illness and Susie embarks on a lifelong journey to repay the debt, a boundless mission that drags her into a different kind of deep water. Mad Sisters explores the devastating shifts in a family struck by mental illness — the tragedy of an adolescent girl with so much promise, discouraged parents who eventually start a new life elsewhere, and the jarring comparison between a free-spirited little sister and the trapped caregiver she becomes.
The memoir slips back and forth in chronology over fifty-eight years, underlining how the past has infused the present with the heavy history the narrator, Susie, has dragged with her. Susie’s ongoing attempts to save her sister draw her deeper and deeper into the caregiver’s push-pull whirlpool. There are moments when Susie is furious with Nancy’s belligerent moods and others when she is flooded with sympathy and guilt. Why her and not me?
About Susan Grundy:
Inspired by the “pure vida” while living in Costa Rica, Susan Grundy veered from her thirty-year career in marketing to writing stories about the weight of emotional distress and how to step into an easier way of being. After her short fiction appeared in the Danforth Review and Montréal Writes, Susan dove into Mad Sisters, a highly personalized account of her caregiving journey for an older sister diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of thirteen. She recently completed a second novel (Black Creek, literary fiction) about an architect who breaks free from a painful ancestral cycle in her female lineage. When not at her desk, Susan can be found walking in nature towards a café. She divides her time between Montreal and London.
