HOW’S THIS FOR A PLOT? Two couples meet, fall in love–each with the other’s partner–dissolve their existing marriages, switch partners, and marry again. Wild enough. But now imagine that within these two fragile families are four young girls, two each, all close in age. Two of them, named Jenny and Jane, even share the same birthday, one year apart. The four girls are all now sisters, of a sort. What sort of sad, strange family is this?
It sounds like an improbable fiction, but it’s all fact according to author Jane Alison’s new memoir, The Sisters Antipodes. Alison’s brief (perhaps not brief enough) book recounts the terrible toll these parents wreaked upon their kids, as fathers switched families and all-but-disappeared, for years at a time, from their daughters’ lives.
Author Jane and Jenny, the two “sisters” closest in age (one year apart, and sharing the same birthday) found themselves locked in a battle for both fathers’ love; you may expect the consequences to be dire, but Alison dissects the pain she felt in excruciating and insightful detail before revealing the full impact of the parents’ choices. Though much of Alison’s insight is beautifully rendered, some of these episodes, teasing apart long-ago feelings, are awkward or over-long; I found myself skimming through feelings to get to plot, desperate to find out how in the world all four girls might manage to survive the cruel upheaval thrust upon them.
The Sisters Antipodes is a bit of a car-crash: you want to look; you shouldn’t; you look again. But despite its flaws, it’s worth a read not just for the sensational story, but for Alison’s moments of brilliant insight into the fragile structure of a young girl’s heart, and the ease with which it can be sent tumbling down.
Do you love memoir as much as we TSP sisters do? Read Marion’s advice on how to tell your story, check out some of our favorite memoir writing here and here, and here, and as always–tell us what you’ll be reading, and why.
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For a good friend of ours in NYC, this was true story for her as well. Her family and a family down the road each divorced, switched, and remarried. It was a wild tale that supposedly had worked out in the end with everyone happy, including the kids, though she did admit that it was hard living it as a kid.
I suppose with family fodder like that why write fiction?
Amazing, Millie. You’re right–when your family story is stranger than fiction, you might not need to make stuff up; though, of course, it can be easier to present hard truths as make believe than as history. That might be why Alison wrote several novels before tackling her own tale…
I have a cousin Ginger, who married her sister Mary’s husband after her sister Mary (my cousin as well) died during an operation. Mary and the husband had children. Ginger and the husband have since had children, so the children are half-brother/sister and 1st cousins as well. It can become complicated.
The other amazing thing about this family saga is it happened before in the family. A great uncle’s wife died and he then married the sister.
You just can’t make this stuff up, can you.