Margaret Hawkins spent her girlhood dazzled by her vivacious, high-achieving sister, Barb. Younger than Barb by eleven years, Margaret saw her sister as the star of her family. Barb's high school years were filled with achievement inside and outside of the classroom. After college, Barb married a charming young professor, Karim Shallal, and embraced living abroad with him, when he was offered a full professorship at Basra University in Iraq. That was in 1971. In three years, everything changed..."On a promising day in 1974, my family's life blew up. That was the day my beautiful, bright, and very American older sister returned from Iraq. Something had changed during those years she was gone, and the Barb we knew never really returned. That Barb had vanished, and though her husband tried to bring her home, she was already gone." For the next 32 years Barb went undiagnosed and untreated. The book recounts the story of those years and the steps Margaret took.
