Prologue

   My need to write this book began in the first weeks and months after my sister disappeared, in August of 1994. That autumn was surreal for me. One minute I would be involved in the quotidian world of grocery shopping and the next I would be abandoning my half-filled cart and walking out of the store, disoriented by having spotted a fashionable middle-aged blonde bearing an uncanny resemblance to Susan. One minute I would be driving in my car singing along with the radio and the next I would be pulling off the road, reduced to tears by a golden oldie that had suddenly conjured up an image of my big sister as a teenager in the 1950s, playing '45s on her phonograph.

   One minute I would be convinced my sister was dead and would long for the phone call telling me her body had been found; the next minute I would be dreading that phone call and latching once again onto the tiny hope that Susan was alive and out there somewhere.

   As an English professor, I have always found writing to be a way of making sense of experience, and so there grew in me the need to take this nightmare and shape it into words, thereby framing it and in a sense controlling it. But as time went on, my need became more complex. I found myself also wanting to write about Susan as a way to try to understand her, to figure out why her life had taken the tragic turn that it did; in particular, I wanted to come to terms with my bewilderment as to why she and I, so similar in so many ways and springing from the same roots, had met with such different fates. One night in early 1998, while I was taking a shower, the title Finding Susan suddenly came to me, and at that moment this book was born. I knew then and there that I wanted to write a book that at once described our family’s nightmare, explored my sister’s life, and ultimately paid tribute to my sister. Finding Susan would be about both the literal finding of Susan—the search for and discovery of her body—and the figurative finding of her, through my narration of her biography and analysis of her character.

   But as I began to think about and write about my sister’s life, an additional purpose began to emerge: I wanted to share her story with other women who are ensnared in violent relationships, particularly relationships in which alcohol is involved. Although Susan’s background, psychology, and marital situation were, like everyone’s, unique, I believe that many such women reading this book will see something of themselves in Susan and will consequently, I hope, be motivated to get out or to get help.

   It was these multiple needs that motivated me as I worked on the book for the first year or so, beginning in February 1998. But by the fall of 1999, when it had become clear that a prosecution would never take place, I had an additional, burning motive: I wanted to show that justice had not been served for my sister. Finding Susan is thus also intended to open readers’ eyes to the cynical fact that in the United States of America it is all too easy to get away with murder.

Molly Hurley Moran
May 2002