Sister Secrets: A Brother's Reveal - Softcover

Matthew Valan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 194616304X ISBN 13: 9781946163042

Publisher: North Dakota State University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Sister Secrets: A Brother's Reveal is a study in regret and hope for dealing with family members who suffer from mental illness, in this case, two sisters who are too-late diagnosed with bipolar disorder. One sister is dead. The other is in prison.

Sister Secrets is written by the brother, who examines family dynamics--a farm family in the Red River Valley of rural North Dakota and Minnesota, an often-absent father involved in politics, and sexual abuse--where people often don't talk publicly (or privately) about mental illness.

Matthew Valan writes to understand what may have led his beloved sisters to act in the ways they did. His questions led him into many dark spaces of their family life, spaces of which he may have been aware but did not fully comprehend. As he made his way through these dark places, a measure of wholeness and healing came to him, unearthing a passion to help people unlock the secrets of their own lives.

"It takes courage to tell this story. From an educational and advocacy perspective, I found Sister Secrets to be compelling and engaging, helpful to those experiencing mental illness and to their family members and friends. Sister Secrets is authentic, well written, and of value to those interested in social work, psychology, counseling, corrections curriculum, and other related behavioral health fields."---Susan Rae Helgeland, MS, Executive Director (Retired), Mental Health America of North Dakota

"Sister Secrets: A Brother s Reveal is about regional memory and the raw and rough past, in all of its awfulness and strangeness. The topics are Lutheran grace, the 1970s, Republican politics, boyhood on the farm, gun un-control, and manic depression when it was just that. As much as the telling jars the reader by recounting abuse, a fatality, and a homicide, Matthew Valan jolts memory by invoking the regional past. The work transcends the scribblings of murder and dysfunction storytellers, and it makes meaning of the world by exploring the contingencies and frailties of regional life as people lived them out." ---Anthony Amato, editor of Conservation on the Northern Plains: New Perspectives, and Associate Professor of Social Science, Southwest Minnesota State University

About this title

About the Author:

Matthew Valan lives with his wife of forty-one years on the home quarter of the Red River Valley family farm his paternal grandfather founded in 1903. Valan earned his BA in Political Science and History from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and holds a Master of Divinity Degree from Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Valan's entire career of thirty-six years in youth and family ministry has taken place in the Fargo Moorhead (North Dakota and Minnesota) community. He is a nationally recognized speaker on youth, family, and educational issues. Valan serves on the Board of Moorhead Area Public Schools and is active in many community organizations. He is currently senior pastor of Messiah Lutheran Church in Fargo and preaching pastor of The Hour of Worship television ministry reaching parts of a four-state area as well as southern portions of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

Valan and his family are in the second year of a native prairie restoration project on their back forty called Dreamfields. Together with his wife, children, and grandchildren he rides horses, skis on water and snow, and hunts with his three dogs: Pre, Kaizer, and Doc. Valan loves to read and write in the log cabin he and his wife built with friends on the farm in 1980. A cancer and abuse survivor, he lives each day with a spirit of gratitude.

Review:

Matt Valan asks, Are there some secrets too terrible to tell? I honestly don t have the answer. But if we don t share them, we ll take them to our graves. For him, the better choice has been to share. His first book, Sister Secrets: A Brother s Reveal lays bare the sorrows and regrets that shadow the fifth0generation farmstead where he and wife Kathy still live a few miles south of Moorhead a window onto bright lives of promise shaken and shuttered by abuse, mental illness and tragedy, culminating in the violent crash that killed one sister and, for the other, the murder that took her husband s life. Ultimately, he says, the tragic family saga is a story of hope. Everyone has something dark and terrible in their lives, or they will someday, he says. Ultimately I ve come to understand you can survive anything anything if you acknowledge the pain and let air in on the wound. Now in this 36th year of youth and ordained ministry, Matt says the telling of the Valan family saga has been both painful and cathartic not just for himself, but for the entire family, from his late parents Merlyn and Shirlee (both living during their daughter s travails) to their adult grandchildren still coping today. The elder brother recounts the serious mental illness that troubled his sisters Liz and Cordee throughout their lives, compounded by poor choices in men and marriage. (continued . . .) --Nancy Edmonds Hanson, "Moving On: Matt Valan's Story Offers Hope for Healing," The [Moorhead, MN] Extra, Vol. 18, no. 4 (April 5, 2018): 1, 2.

About this edition

• Publisher: North Dakota State University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 194616304X
• ISBN 13: 9781946163042
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128