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About Sister Secrets: A Brother's Reveal
Sister Secrets: A Brother's Reveal is a study in regret and hope for dealing with family members who suffer from mental illness, in this case, two sisters who are too-late diagnosed with bipolar disorder. One sister is dead. The other is in prison. Sister Secrets is written by the brother, who examines family dynamics--a farm family in the Red River Valley of rural North Dakota and Minnesota, an often-absent father involved in politics, and sexual abuse--where people often don't talk publicly (or privately) about mental illness. Matthew Valan writes to understand what may have led his beloved sisters to act in the ways they did. His questions led him into many dark spaces of their family life, spaces of which he may have been aware but did not fully comprehend. As he made his way through these dark places, a measure of wholeness and healing came to him, unearthing a passion to help people unlock the secrets of their own lives. "It takes courage to tell this story. From an educational and advocacy perspective, I found Sister Secrets to be compelling and engaging, helpful to those experiencing mental illness and to their family members and friends. Sister Secrets is authentic, well written, and of value to those interested in social work, psychology, counseling, corrections curriculum, and other related behavioral health fields."---Susan Rae Helgeland, MS, Executive Director (Retired), Mental Health America of North Dakota "Sister Secrets: A Brother s Reveal is about regional memory and the raw and rough past, in all of its awfulness and strangeness. The topics are Lutheran grace, the 1970s, Republican politics, boyhood on the farm, gun un-control, and manic depression when it was just that. As much as the telling jars the reader by recounting abuse, a fatality, and a homicide, Matthew Valan jolts memory by invoking the regional past. The work transcends the scribblings of murder and dysfunction storytellers, and it makes meaning of the world by exploring the contingencies and frailties of regional life as people lived them out." ---Anthony Amato, editor of Conservation on the Northern Plains: New Perspectives, and Associate Professor of Social Science, Southwest Minnesota State University
