What prompts a young woman to abandon the safe bounds of convention for the unknown?
At first, all MĂ©lanie Berliet understood was that she'd lost her sense of what "supposed to" meant. And that her older sister, CĂ©line, was sick.
While it's tough to understand what leads a person into addiction - to witness someone you love kind-of kill herself - the truth is that you can learn from it. By the time CĂ©line died at age 30, she was Kermit The Frog green and she vomited blood more frequently than she was able to eat. In less than a decade, she had gone from summa cum laude Columbia graduate to NYU PhD student to unemployed, rambling, stumbling drunk saddled with a cirrhotic liver beyond repair. By the time CĂ©line died, her younger sister, MĂ©lanie, was no longer a Miss Goody Two Shoes from a waspy Connecticut suburb trotting down the sensible path. She was an adult who had abandoned a secure job on Wall Street to establish a career as a writer committed to exploring fascinating subcultures.
As CĂ©line's illness escalated, you see, a basic lesson crept up on Mlanie: Life is beautifully short, and fragile as hell. Life happens. Gradually, MĂ©lanie stopped agonizing over what she was supposed to do/think/know/read/listen to/watch/feel, or who she was supposed to be/befriend/love/like/learn from. So she pitched projects that sounded crazy and/or dangerous to most, but which gave her a thrill and helped her establish a career as an immersive journalist. She grew some balls, so to speak, after freeing herself from caring about what others might think.
The devastating beauty of what happened to CĂ©line forced MĂ©lanie to question who she is. However unwittingly, in dying, CĂ©line empowered her younger sister to take risks - to live. This is their story.