THE BOOK OF ATLANTIS BLACK
The Search for a Sister Gone Missing
By Betsy Bonner

When we meet Atlantis Black in 2002, she is onstage, an up-and-coming musician performing at the Sidewalk Café in New York City’s East Village. Atlantis “tossed her head like a horse assailed by flies” as she sang about “sex, drugs and a love of pain, death and transformation.” Watching Atlantis from the crowd is her younger sister, Betsy. The scene elegantly establishes the dynamic at the core of Betsy Bonner’s haunting, mind-bending memoir: Atlantis as the charismatic, troubled performer; Betsy the stable observer, witnessing her sister’s life unfold.

Six years later, a body is found in a Tijuana hotel room with Atlantis’s identification. The death looks like an accidental overdose, but inconsistencies pile up. The autopsy photographs do not appear to match the body Betsy’s mother identifies at the morgue. Are the toxicology reports forged? Could Atlantis still be alive? “The Book of Atlantis Black” traces Bonner’s search for the truth. It is also a wrenching portrait of Atlantis and her role in Bonner’s life.

From an early age, the sisters seem bound for different fates. Nancy (who changed her name to Atlantis at 17) is molested by a neighbor at age 8. At 13 she cuts her wrists and begins taking antidepressants. By her mid-20s she’s addicted to painkillers and suffering from panic attacks. When Atlantis attempts suicide in 1998, Betsy is studying abroad at Oxford. When Atlantis spends a week in jail on a prescription drug fraud charge, Betsy is “island-hopping” during a teaching gig in Greece. “That was just how life went for us,” Bonner writes in hindsight. “Our destinies were already written.”

Bonner constructs much of her memoir from Atlantis’s emails, Facebook updates, interviews, Craigslist ads, voice mail messages and song lyrics. This collage captures both Atlantis’s mesmerizing voice and her instability; the Facebook updates — Atlantis is …, Atlantis is … — are incantatory, spellbinding. Bonner’s narrative choice to follow many of these extracts with her reactions as she experienced them in the moment can sometimes be more compelling in conception than in execution. After a Facebook message in which Atlantis brags, “Oh honey, I run a whole cartel from Barstow to Bejing [sic],” Bonner’s response — “She was obviously kidding, pretending to be some big-time drug dealer” — feels at once logically superfluous and emotionally insufficient. Bonner’s interjections throughout Atlantis’s searing “final will and testament” (“I couldn’t imagine sending Atlantis’s jacket to her first adult therapist”) douse much of that document’s fire. But if this strategy frustrates, it also provokes, refusing to supply the aestheticized reflections upon trauma that readers may expect, even crave.

Keeping the reader close to her real-time perspective also allows Bonner to pull off a riveting balancing act in the memoir’s final third, when we find ourselves on increasingly unsteady ground, forced to ask with each new twist: Is this a veritable true-crime investigation? Or is Betsy — and are we — merely “obsessing over details and typos … doing everything I could to avoid the truth”? As a medical examiner writes to her, “You’ve inlaid your obsession into the frame of writing a book.”

Much earlier in the story, Betsy and Nancy and their mother go on a cross-country road trip. At a Super 8 in New Mexico, Nancy and their mother — a fascinating figure, vulnerable and cruel — bond over their struggles with mental illness; the mother eventually commits suicide too. That night, Nancy bestows upon her sister a nickname that reverberates across this memoir: “Lucky Betsy.” What does it mean to be lucky, to be spared, when such luck carries with it the burden of bearing witness? In the end, Bonner is the only one who can tell this story, because she is the only one who survives it.