No two siblings experience the same childhood. Birth order, timing, parental circumstances, the quality of attachment – these and other factors combine to shape distinct and divergent realities. Add to this the distorting lens of memory and the past becomes each child’s unique mosaic rather than a shared family tableau.
Esther Freud’s My Sister and Other Lovers, a sequel of sorts to her semi-autobiographical debut Hideous Kinky, revisits a complex, peripatetic family. The earlier book followed young sisters Lucy and Bea through a wild, rootless childhood in Morocco with their bohemian mother. In this new work, we meet them as adults still attempting to anchor themselves in the wake of an unconventional upbringing.
The novel is a fragmented tapestry of memory, longing and unresolved tension between both sisters and their unpredictable mother. Lucy, the narrator, is lost – isolated, emotionally hungry, endlessly trying to contact her unreachable sister via scribbled notes and unanswered messages. Bea is stubborn and unyielding but equally shaped by their shared past. Their mother remains unreliable, offering only fleeting stabs at stability.
Lucy’s attempts to repair the relationship between her mother and sister and to establish order in their world are futile and, in a closing scene, she resorts to rearranging her child’s dollhouse.
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In a recent Guardian article, Freud reflected on writing the novel while her real-life sister, fashion designer Bella Freud, began publishing autobiographical vignettes on Instagram called Sunday Stories.
“How strange,” Esther writes, “to read my sister’s interpretation of events ... I am tempted to respond, as she must have been doing for years: ‘That’s not what it was like!’” This tension between versions of truth, between art and life, beats at the heart of the novel. As an aside, her use of the word ‘interpretation’ may also be loaded, when one considers their exalted lineage.
The narrative is ragged and deliberately unstructured, but Freud’s control is masterful. Her prose is lucid, effortless and evocative. It captures the slippery, often conflicting nature of memory and the subtle devastation of unresolved family wounds.
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” Larkin wrote. Freud doesn’t argue otherwise – but she also shows how that same damage can fuel creative reckoning. My Sister and Other Lovers is both an act of personal excavation and a meditation on the potential cost of turning life into art.
Chaotic, tender and propulsive, My Sister and Other Lovers is a breathless description of missed connections and half-remembered moments. Like memory itself, it is fractured. And like memory, it lingers long after the last line.
