The Passionate Sister

An alcoholic fights to reclaim her life while tending to a dying friend and young children in Thorndike’s luminous novel of recovery.

Fifty-seven-year-old anesthesiologist Ginny Thorndike is leaving rehab after overdosing on booze and pills following a downward spiral of addiction that broke up her marriage and got her medical license revoked. Helping her is her son Rob, who stays at her Sag Harbor, New York, cottage, flushes her stash, and distracts her from cravings. When he returns to his six-member group marriage at an Ohio commune, her other son Jamie and his boyfriend, Miles, fly up from Key West to continue the vigil, but the caretaking dynamic flips when Miles develops Lou Gehrig’s Disease. As the fatal neurodegenerative ailment worsens, Ginny, with nothing better to do, moves to Key West and helps Jamie with Miles: She feeds him, helps him use the toilet, wheels him to the beach, and develops an intense spiritual bond with him as death approaches. Duty calls again when Rob’s group marriage collapses and his wife Natalia gives birth to twins; she abandons the family, prompting Rob to summon Ginny for emergency baby care. The twins run her ragged but also reinvigorate her, and over several years she regains her medical license and starts a thriving relationship with a man. Thorndike makes Ginny a complex, prickly, conflicted heroine, ashamed of her sins, apprehensive about her future, adrift and in search of redemption. Her story provides a vivid study of the psychic fragility of recovery, conveyed in haunting prose that evokes the unappeasable power of alcoholic yearning. (“She’s afraid of how she’ll feel when she’s alone, at dusk, at seven at night, at eight and nine and ten. She wants to say, Don’t leave me.”) The result is a moving testament to the ways in which taking up the burdens of others can lift a heavy weight from the heart.

A captivating story of midlife renewal.