Excellent and inspiring for anyone!

books:


	• If I Am Missing or Dead: A Sister's Story of Love, Murder, and Liberation Janine Latus Simon & Schuster, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 123 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent and inspiring for anyone!

This book may seem heavy and undesired to one who has not experienced this type of relationship before but it is surprisingly raw and heart provoking. I myself have never experienced anything like this and yet I found myself involved and in relationship with Janine and Amy. The story touches a deep part of my heart connecting me to the struggles that many women face. The story inspires a fight for the cause to protect the real lives of women who experience this every day. I will never forget this story. It has inspired strength and courage of heart.

Gut Wrenching Memoir

"Today Ron and I are romantically involved, but I fear I have placed myself at risk in a variety of ways. Based on his criminal past, writing this out just seems like the smart thing to do. If I am missing or dead this obviously has not protected me. However, hopefully it will give you enough to go on to at least question Ron and make sure, if he is behind it, that he won't get away with it."

These were the last words 37-year old Amy Latus would ever write in a letter penned on April 29, 2002 to the Knox County Sheriff, a letter which she placed in her desk drawer at Kimberly-Clark Corporation to be discovered by her co-workers after her sudden and inexplicable disappearance on July 5th. Her battered and partially decomposed body would not be found until July 22nd at a construction site wrapped in painter's tarp, her boyfriend and killer Ron Ball's tools of the trade. It was as if Amy knew with all certainty of her savage fate.

"If I Am Missing Or Dead", a memoir that made the New York Times Bestseller List, isn't so much about Amy as it is about her older sister and author Janine Latus and her angst-ridden childhood and adolescence, as well as the dysfunctional and abusive relationships throughout the better part of her life, particularly her marriage to now ex-husband Kurt. There are few words to describe what one will feel when reading the painful retelling of Janine's subjection to physical and verbal abuse as well as Amy's violent and untimely death at the hands of a man from whom she only wanted love. Expect anger, frustration, sadness and the inability to put the book down until you have reached the very end in an attempt to once and for all read of the resolve and peace that Janine finally acquired, Amy's death in 2002 serving as the catalyst for her emotional release. Part biography and part autobiography, the book is written in an accessible and easy style and at just a little over 300 pages, is a quick read. It is short, but most definitely NOT sweet and emotionally gut wrenching to the last.

Both Janine's and Amy's story are clear examples of psychologically abused women following a cyclical pattern of behavior in which they subconsciously seek out potential abusers because they know nothing of normalcy and/or healthy relationships with men. Janine admits to this herself when she says that Amy "never had a good relationship with a man, nor a relationship with a good man". This stems back to their childhood and their strained relationship with their father, a man who drank copiously, largely disregarded their mother's feelings and made inappropriate, unpleasant and derogatory sexual overtures to Janine, her sisters and their female friends. He is inarguably a sexist pig and indifferent towards the girls' discomfort; after Janine is ruthlessly groped by the father of neighborhood kids she is babysitting, her father apathetically responds with, "If you tell anyone what happened, you'll be known as a slut."

Their upbringing steeped in the guilt mongering and misogyny of the Catholic Church did not help matters.

"In church I learned: Girls are seductresses, starting with Eve, who got us all kicked out of the Garden of Eden by being weak, by taking a bite from the tree of knowledge, and - most important - by enticing poor, innocent Adam to do the same. Everything bad can be traced back to women, and the only way to make up for the lustiness of my gender is by acknowledging my guilt, carrying it, wearing it like a badge." (pg. 29)

It is from both the apathy of the church and of her father that Janine and Amy are destined to suffer in every romantic relationship. Janine says about her losing her virginity to a boy named Kenny that "he actually does love me, with the puppyish devotion of an 18-year old. He says it's because I am incredible, amazing, but I think it's because I give him sex. I will think that and think that and think that. With man after man. I will think that each wants me only for sex, that sex is what I have to offer." (pg. 34) This is only the start of her many afflicted romances. First there is Michael, who takes Janine to an eye-opening Thanksgiving dinner at his parents' house where his father hurls the turkey against the wall in a rage when his mother forgets the yams in their lovely and extensive spread. When Michael flies into his own rage on a skiing trip and severely beats Janine, she runs into the arms of her future husband, a doctor named Kurt who is married with a child on the way.

Kurt seems to be the man of her dreams but once she accidentally wrecks his new Mazda shortly before their wedding, all bets are off. Initially genteel and loving, he graduates quickly to physical and verbal abuse, hurling one unfounded accusation of infidelity after another derived from his fears of rejection and self-induced paranoia. He also belittles her, spitting at her more than once about her feminist views and using passive-aggressive statements to pick fights and incite guilt trips ("If you don't want to have sex, just say so", "You want to f*ck him/he just wants to f*ck you", "every time I try to do something nice for you, you ruin it!"). He is imperious and anal to the nth degree, from his insistence on the alphabetized pantry to the skimpy, revealing clothes he pushes Janine to wear despite her self-consciousness and physical discomfort. This rages on until she finally leaves him about a year after they adopt a baby girl named Sarah. Knowing it is no longer just her that is affected by the darkness and animosity of her marriage, it propels her to ultimately put a stop to it once and for all.

Meanwhile, Amy deals with the rages of her alcoholic husband Jim and once she finally works up the courage to leave him, she soars to greater heights and acquires her job at Kimberly-Clark as a pricing analyst. A few months after graduate school and gaining her first-ever mortgage in her own name, Amy has her fateful run-in with Ron, an unemployed house painter from whom she consistently craved physical affection and received nothing but grief. Amongst all the insincere love notes and whispers of sweet nothings that Amy so believed were genuine are pleas for financial help. After bailing Ron out of jail after his third DUI and paying his exorbitant legal fees, she also purchased a $30,000 truck for him and supplies for the start of his own house painting business. All told, Amy loaned him over $50,000 before he ruthlessly murdered her and lied about it. It's hard to understand why she put so much faith in Ron, a man so unreliable and untrustworthy that most women would never have taken a chance on him, continuing to support him when her gut instinct told her to stop. Ron even refused to consummate their so-called relationship because "he respected her too much to have sex with her", making it perfectly clear that his loyalty lay with her bank account.

The memoir ends with the finalizing of Janine's divorce, the ceremonious spreading of Amy's ashes and Ron's murder conviction two years after Amy's death.

Bottom line: A ruthless and eye-opening dissection of abusive relationships, I (and Janine, most definitely) can only hope that those currently in an abusive situation who read this memoir will find the strength within its pages to stop the vicious cycle once and for all.

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A must read for every woman

Janine Latus does a fabulous job of describing the slippery slope of abuse. This book is written beautifully and captures 2 stories of abuse that many can relate to.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

In April 2002, Janine Latus's youngest sister, Amy, wrote a note and taped it to the inside of her desk drawer. Today Ron Ball and I are romantically involved, it read, but I fear I have placed myself at risk in a variety of ways. Based on his criminal past, writing this out just seems like the smart thing to do. If I am missing or dead this obviously has not protected me...

That same spring Janine Latus was struggling to leave her marriage -- a marriage to a handsome and successful man. A marriage others emulated. A marriage in which she felt she could do nothing right and everything wrong. A marriage in which she felt afraid, controlled, inadequate, and trapped.

Ten weeks later, Janine Latus had left her marriage. She was on a business trip to the East Coast, savoring her freedom, attending a work conference, when she received a call from her sister Jane asking if she'd heard from Amy. Immediately, Janine's blood ran cold. Amy was missing.

Helicopters went up and search dogs went out. Coworkers and neighbors and family members plastered missing posters with Amy's picture across the county. It took more than two weeks to find Amy's body, wrapped in a tarpaulin and buried at a building site. It took nearly two years before her killer, her former boyfriend Ron Ball, was sentenced for her murder.

Amy died in silent fear and pain. Haunted by this, Janine Latus turned her journalistic eye inward. How, she wondered, did two seemingly well-adjusted, successful women end up in strings of physically or emotionally abusive relationships with men? If I Am Missing or Dead is a heart-wrenching journey of discovery as Janine Latus traces the roots of her own -- and her sister's -- victimization with unflinching candor. This beautifully written memoir will move readers from the first to the last page. At once a confession, a call to break the cycle of abuse, and a deeply felt love letter to her baby sister, Amy Lynne Latus, If I Am Missing or Dead is an unforgettable read.

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