Finding Susan - Hardcover

Moran PhD, Associate Professor Molly Hurley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809325195 ISBN 13: 9780809325191

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Synopsis

A woman’ s heartrending search for her sister



Advancing with the suspense and deft reportage of the true-crime genre and fueled by the poignancy of a literary memoir, Finding Susan is Molly Hurley Moran’ s pointed exploration of the disappearance of her sister and her family’ s descent into the surreal world of psychics and detectives they once dismissed as the stuff of Lifetime movies. 



Susan Hurley Harrison disappeared from upscale Ruxton, Maryland on August 5, 1994. Her body was discovered in the woods of northern Maryland two years later and her death was ruled a homicide. Although Susan’ s case drew substantial media attention— including a spot on Unsolved Mysteries— no one, to date, has ever been charged with her murder. In piecing together a mosaic of Susan’ s final years, Moran grew to believe her sister was a victim of domestic violence.



An academic by trade, Moran employs a scholar’ s precision and razor-sharp feminist analysis in this valiant effort to come to terms with Susan’ s life and death and to understand her sister in a way she did not when she was alive. “ Finding” Susan refers to both the search for Susan's body and the search for the formative forces of her life.



Mirroring elements of high-profile cases from Laci Peterson to Nicole Brown Simpson, Finding Susan is one woman’ s chronicle of loss and remembrance that arrestingly details the helplessness experienced by families of missing persons and calls critical attention to our alarming blindness to domestic abuse. Including appendixes of domestic violence resources, Finding Susan serves as a guide for concerned family members and friends of at-risk women to help identify the warning signs of domestic abuse. Thirty-six illustrations are a powerful complement to the volume.

About this title

About the Author

Molly Hurley Moran, a professor of writing in the Division of Academic Enhancement at the University of Georgia, is the author of Margaret Drabble: Existing Within Structures and Penelope Lively, as well as numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. She resides in Athens, Georgia, with her husband.

From the Inside Flap

"Finding Susan is a completely enthralling book and I read it in two late-night sessions. A sister's wrenching memories of domestic violence and the baffling disappearance and murder of a woman who seemed to have everything will probably make you cry, and, I hope, want to take action against the battering of women. This is an important book and beautifully written."
Ann Rule, author of Every Breath You Take

"Susan Harrison's story is, regrettably, a universal one and we ignore this at our peril. Molly Moran's candid memoir serves to remind us that anyone's sister, mother or daughter can make the kind of choices that end in tragedy. It is a painful story, but an essential one for those who want to understand the intractable nature of domestic violence. Yes, Susan's life mattered and her death matters, too."
Laura Lippman, author of Every Secret Thing

"Finding Susan reads like a classic novel, both in its import and its ability to capture the reader, propelling her or him forward to discover the truth. Like Native Son by Richard Wright, which reveals a story about the nature of racism and fear, this work tells the truth about women, violence, and alcoholism. Moran s book may be as critically important as Uncle Tom s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair."
Rebecca S. Katz, associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminology at Morehead State University

"I found Molly Moran s account of her sister s tragedy both thoughtful and moving; the book is a significant commentary on the nature of domestic violence."
Penelope Lively, author of Moon Tiger, Winner of the Booker Prize

Reviews

In August 1994, Susan Hurley Harrison disappeared from her Maryland home. Two years later her body was discovered; she had been murdered. No one has been charged with the crime. The victim's sister, Molly, has always believed that Susan's husband was responsible for her death, and, in this poignant book, she lays out her evidence: the conflicting stories he told after his wife vanished, the history of domestic abuse, the husband's suspicious behavior. She describes the family's public efforts to find Susan: Molly and her siblings conducted their own investigation, and there were newspaper and magazine articles, and even an Unsolved Mysteries segment. Although she freely admits that the book reflects her own opinions and not any legally established fact, the author makes a persuasive case that her brother-in-law killed her sister. The book is also an examination of the nature of a domestic-violence relationship, in which a woman can become trapped for years, despite her own intelligence and self-reliance. A compelling, although necessarily unfinished, true-crime story. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809325195
• ISBN 13: 9780809325191
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280