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The Lost Girls of Willowbrook

Review

The Lost Girls of Willowbrook

Historical fiction, like any other form of fiction, has its rulebook, and the author flouts it at his or her peril. While the author can --- and almost certainly does --- take liberties with history, there are serious, prudential limitations in doing so. One can’t, for example, write about Davy Crockett and then not have him die at the Alamo. (Well, you can, but then you’ve left the precincts of historical fiction for the broad pastures of alternative history, which in turn has its own rules.)

But it’s not just characters that matter; it’s settings as well. The author has to be honest about where he or she is in history, and what it was like. This does not mean that if you are writing a Regency romance, you have to be incredibly specific with the not-so-romantic features of Regency history, such as what going to the dentist would have been like. There’s nothing wrong with putting a gloss on history --- most of the time. But there are places, times and events that are 100 percent serious business, and anyone who writes about them has an obligation to tell the truth in full. Ellen Marie Wiseman understands this, and to her credit, she has turned out a portrait of Willowbrook State School that is unvarnished, painful and startlingly clear.

"Bringing the unquiet ghosts of Willowbrook to life is what this book does best, and if it didn’t do anything else, it would be worth your time.... [C]redit to Ellen Marie Wiseman for bringing Willowbrook back to the national consciousness."

You could say that Willowbrook was a snake pit --- Robert F. Kennedy said so once, and everyone ignored him --- but that doesn’t cover it. The snakes can’t help being there; they’re just snakes. You could say that Willowbrook was one of Dante’s circles of hell, but that doesn’t cover it either. It’s demons that run hell, and they torment the souls of the damned because that’s what demons do. Willowbrook was awful beyond the power of mere adjectives to describe. It was run by people who thought they knew what they were doing, and went to bed every night thinking that they were doing good in this world.

They were not.

Wiseman contrives to put her narrator, Sage Winters, inside Willowbrook. Sage initially has the idea that a “state school” has classrooms, teachers and books --- and finds out that this is just the first of the cynical lies that surround the place. She soon learns the essential truth --- that Willowbrook is a lonely citadel where abuse and neglect reign over a kingdom of misery. Or if that’s too poetic, it’s a place where people with mental illness and developmental and intellectual disabilities rot in their own filth. THE LOST GIRLS OF WILLOWBROOK is extremely graphic in this area, but it has to be. Anything else would be not only dishonest but also disrespectful.

Bringing the unquiet ghosts of Willowbrook to life is what this book does best, and if it didn’t do anything else, it would be worth your time. But there’s a story to be told here, and while it is undoubtedly compelling --- I lost a good part of a night’s sleep over it --- adding an undeniably creepy murder mystery to the mix seems a little forced. (Wiseman does portray Geraldo Rivera as one of the heroes of the story, and whatever you might think about his subsequent career, she gets this part exactly right.)

Willowbrook was bulldozed years ago; the property now hosts Staten Island College. Pennhurst --- a similar institution in Pennsylvania with its own terrible history --- is still there, crumbling and abandoned, and plays host to a haunted house attraction each Halloween when it’s not being pored over by TV ghost hunters.

The story of what happened in these places --- where good, well-meaning individuals immiserated thousands of the most vulnerable and fragile people for what they thought was the best of reasons --- is an American story that deserves to be told and retold. It’s a story that has to be taken seriously, and credit to Ellen Marie Wiseman for bringing Willowbrook back to the national consciousness.

Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds on September 10, 2022

The Lost Girls of Willowbrook
by Ellen Marie Wiseman