Ways One Can Disappear: A Review of Betsy Bonner’s The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a sister Gone Missing
The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Sister Gone Missing
Betsy Bonner
Tin House Books
August 2020
ISBN: 978-1947793774
280 pages
Reviewed by Luna Adler
A charming musician with a portfolio of riot grrrl songs. Her addiction to painkillers. Federal drug charges. A posse of sketchy characters with pseudonyms like Sugar Mama, The German Gentleman, and The Millionaire. The musician’s mysterious disappearance. And a body—found on the floor of a hotel room in Tijuana and accompanied by the musician’s IDs—with characteristics that don’t quite match those of the missing woman.
While the premise of The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Girl Gone Missing may sound like that of a pulpy thriller, it isn’t a work of imagination. This memoir/true crime hybrid highlights the real life of Eunice “Nancy” Bonner, a Pennsylvania native who changed her name to Atlantis Black, left her rural hometown to make it as a singer-songwriter, and later disappeared. Written by her younger sister, Betsy Bonner, the book documents the author’s decade-long search to discover whether or not her sibling is really dead.
Bonner begins by outlining the girls’ intertwined childhood in memory-driven vignettes, many of which are saturated with abuse: physical harm perpetrated by their father, Atlantis’s molestation by an older neighbor, and their mother’s verbal cruelty. While there are hopeful moments—Atlantis comes out as queer, meets a beautiful DJ named Leah, and later moves to San Francisco with her—the narrative is permeated with trauma. By the time she’s in her late twenties, Atlantis has been to rehab, spent a week in jail on burglary and prescription fraud charges, and tried to kill herself twice.
When Atlantis disappears two-thirds of the way through the story, the book morphs from a memoir into a real-life detective novel. Bonner uses autopsy reports, phone calls, interviews, old videotapes, scribbled song lyrics found on discarded napkins, surveillance footage, voicemails, pixelated iPhone photos, emails, and Atlantis’s Facebook statuses to piece together a theory of what happened. Her tenacity is admirable and, at times, obsessive. It’s also laced with self-awareness. “But what was I doing there, digging like a rat through my sister’s junk?” she asks as she sifts through Atlantis’s belongings, ravenous for clues.
Bonner is an MFA-holding poet, known for her collection Round Lake, and the former director of the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center. Her literary prowess is apparent in the book’s solid prose and, as the search goes on, a deft exploration of her own narratorial unreliability. “I didn’t want people to worry about my state of mind, or to doubt my sanity,” she writes, even as she documents her spiral into paranoia, illuminating the moments in which she questions her mental faculties. “I was ashamed to have wasted years obsessing over details and typos, of doing everything I could to avoid the truth—if I could settle on what the truth was.”
Permeating the narrative is the juxtaposition between the flailing Atlantis and Bonner—nicknamed “Lucky Betsy”—who maintains stable relationships, hobnobs with famous poets, and spends her days writing on the sun-soaked islands of Greece. “That was just how life went for us; our destinies were already written,” Bonner states. “It was because she was born first and had been kicked around more than I was by our father. It was because she’d been molested. It was because she was mentally ill.”
Even while addressing Atlantis’s history, Bonner manages to steer clear of well-worn cliches. She doesn’t indulge the oft-glamorized trope of the Troubled Female Artist, nor the archetype of the Pretty Missing White Girl. The character of Atlantis is more complicated. She is a victim but not innocent. She may have lost control of the narrative, but for most of her life Atlantis strove to portray a distinct image. Writes Bonner: “Part of Atlantis’s persona was to be in terrible shape, suicidal, barely getting by, just awakened from a bad dream into a worse reality.”
During a photoshoot, the photographer asks Atlantis how she’d like to be depicted. “Make me look desperate,” she says. In this book, Bonner does just that, but perhaps takes it further than Atlantis would have wanted. “My sister was not the worldly woman she thought she was,” Bonner writes. “She was a sad, pitiful creature. If she couldn’t kill herself, she’d find someone to kill her.”
Whether or not Atlantis is alive is the mystery that fuels the book, but Bonner manages to create something richer than a real-life whodunnit. Instead, she paints a nuanced portrait of an older sister: a Scorpio, a promising performer who once played at the SideWalk Café alongside Regina Spektor, a survivor of abuse, a woman with an addiction, and, ironically, a cartography major who vanished from the earth at the age of thirty-one.
As Bonner writes of her sister’s self-given title: “I never knew how she came to choose the name, but it seems perfect: the Atlantis of legend is mystical, self-destroying and forever lost.” Her physical self may be gone but Bonner renders her—occasionally magnificently, more often wretchedly, and always vividly—on the pages of The Book of Atlantis Black, an evocative account of her sister’s life and an exploration of the myriad ways one can disappear.
Betsy Bonner is the author of the poetry collection Round Lake. She is a former Director of the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center, where she now teaches creative writing. She is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the T. S. Eliot House. She grew up in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and lives in southwestern Vermont.
Luna Adler (@RealLunaAdler) is a Brooklyn-based writer/illustrator and a recovering member of the Park Slope Food Coop. You can find her words, art, short videos, long-winded comics, and slightly unhinged newsletters on her website: www.lunaadler.com.