Brilliant Disguise

by Susan Kellam

After their nuclear family exploded into a vaporous mushroom cloud, the two siblings could only duck and cover. The young Susan basked in her brother Robert's glow. Teachers singled her out because, certainly, the little sister would excel too. But how could she ever reach their expectations? Instead, she rebelled, chose the wrong men, drank and took drugs. Susan talked her way into a job at Rolling Stone magazine in 1976. Three years later, as an organizer of five nights of No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, and many others, she got snared in the rock politics scramble and her brother saved her. Many years later, though, she could not save him. Only in retrospect can Susan piece together how Robert's too-brief life was a brilliant disguise. Traumatized by their childhood experience, he buried his pain behind an outsized personality. On his twelfth wedding anniversary in 1990, he ended his life. Brilliant Disguise winds together Susan's rock-and-roll odyssey with an exploration of Robert's life, teasing out clues as to why the past so dangerously swamped him.

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