PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewHelen Fremont wrote a memoir and her family metaphorically killed her for it. What’s a writer to do, then, but write another memoir that attempts to understand why? ... [a] crackling second book ... The Escape Artist is a stand-alone work. Graceful, gracious and, with the exception of a few vamping detours, an engrossing tour through a dense, if troubling, landscape. Still, the portrait accrues meaning when viewed as a palimpsest. There are fresh revelations in the second book that illuminate events in the first. They make sense of some of the madness, and deepen the reader’s compassion for an already compassion-worthy clan. It feels worth noting that, in After Long Silence, Fremont elided many facts. She did so at the behest of a family by which she still hoped to be embraced. The Escape Artist, then, as the title suggests, is Fremont unbound. And yet the book’s very existence confirms a stubborn, and more global, truth: When it comes to family, you’re never truly free.
