Annie’s Ghosts
A Journey Into a Family Secret
by Steve Luxenberg
Hyperion, 2009. 401 pages.
Review written October 6, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review
It’s a fun story how I happened to read this book: I met the author!
Back in April, I gave myself a retreat at Blackwater Falls Lodge in Blackwater State Falls, West Virginia. The lodge has a large common room, with an abundance of big, round tables. Someone had started a jigsaw puzzle on one of them – a trap for me! I started working on the puzzle after dinner, before carrying out my plan of reading and writing in my room, and got hooked. Other people came to join me – among them was a nice couple. The puzzle was of a giant library, and it came out that I was a librarian – and this gentleman was a writer! His wife was a retired school librarian. He was also an associate editor for the Washington Post. Well, it was nice doing the puzzle with them – and then they invited me to play a game of Upwords with them. And instead of a “productive” evening reading and writing, I had a lovely social evening playing Upwords with this obviously highly intelligent journalist and his wife.
When I got home, I checked out his books, then decided to read the older one first. It’s taken me a long time – mostly one or two chapters per week (because I read lighter stuff at bedtime, which is my main reading time). I did not find myself forgetting what went before when I picked it up each week – it’s memorable reading – and I finally finished off the last five or six chapters in one sitting last weekend. This is by no means light reading, but it’s absorbing, and it’s super interesting.
So now let me tell you about the book this nice man wrote. It’s the story of discovering his mother had a disabled sister she kept a complete secret after she married. He first heard a rumor of it when his mother was hospitalized, and then confirmation after her death. So then began the process of researching this aunt, Annie, whom he hadn’t known about.
At first, he assumed she lived away from the family most of her life, but Annie wasn’t moved to a state institution until she was twenty-one years old. She was born with one leg shorter than the other, that wouldn’t grow properly, and had possible mental retardation and mental illness. Annie spent the rest of her life – decades – in the institution, yet his mother had told everyone she was an only child.
So this is the story of Steve Luxenberg digging up the truth. And finding out why his mother kept this secret. It gives a window into mental health care in the 1940s and how much it has changed. We even learn about the experiences of his mother’s cousin, who was the only one of her immediate family to survive a massacre in a Ukrainian village during the Holocaust.
The secret seems simple on the surface – a disabled sister who’d been put into an institution. But the story ends up being sprawling, as Steve Luxenberg works to understand his mother’s motivation in keeping the secret. This involves attitudes at the time toward mental and physical disabilities, treatment options at the time, and even politics at the time as it involved state institutions. Then there was the bureaucratic paperwork to even have access to the records, if they existed, and the effort of tracking down people who’d known his mother as a child – when her sister lived with the family – and afterward. How many of them knew of the secret? Unfortunately, many of them had already passed. He got more information piece by piece, and the book is something of a detective story, as well as a broad work of history – mixed with journalism and memoir.
The whole thing was fascinating reading, but my favorite part came in a vignette toward the end. He begins most chapters with his own memories with his mother, and this one was about playing her favorite board game with her – Upwords. That made me smile. Made me feel like I had a tiny piece of the experience of this book. And Steve Luxenberg and his wife still play Upwords.
Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/annies_ghosts.html
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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.
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