Julia Glass’s Sisterly Plot

Glass: And she's a redhead, too.

SISTER CONFLICT FICTION could be its own genre. A fine theme for a novel, off the top of my (red) head I can think of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in which we watch Dorothea and Celia Brooke do the “She Said, She Said” thing; Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the very title of which sums up the Elinor and Marianne Dashwood’s divergent POVs; and then, of course, those varying March girls of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. To these ranks we must now add Louisa and Clem Jardine, creations of Julia Glass, whose recent novel, I See You Everywhere, brings these women to the page.

Glass has quite a history. You could practically hear the literary jaws drop when she won the National Book Award for an earlier novel, the 2002 Three Junes, beating out such luminaries as Ann Packer (The Dive From Clausen’s Pier) and Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones). At the time Julia Glass was an unknown and the novel, her first.

How cool is that?

Born in 1956, educated at Yale, having studied painting in Paris, she turned to fiction writing only in her late 30s after a set of devastating events that included the end of her first marriage, a diagnosis of breast cancer and, soon after that, the suicide of her younger sister. Diving into her fiction, a short story became the award-winning novel, Three Junes (Pantheon Books, 2002). That was followed by The Whole World Over (Random House, 2007) and then  I See You Everywhere (Pantheon Books, 2008), which takes on two sisters and a loss that changes their relationship forever.

“When you have a sibling,” said Glass in a recent interview, “You’re thrown together, quite possibly for life, with someone who is more genetically like you than anybody else in the world. There is no way you can ever sever that relationship, even if you don’t talk for decades.”

Referring to siblings as “potentially your greatest soulmate or ally,” Glass goes on to say that “the truth is that person is also set up to be your greatest rival and competitor in life. It’s such a paradox!”

A paradox, indeed, and one we’re familiar with here at TSP, as noted in many ways, including in what we choose to read.

“A lot of hidden truths are exposed between siblings,” she said. “Even though we were not best friends, in times of extreme crisis, we’d call each other. It’s a subtle wish to speak to the person who will tell you the hardest truths about yourself.”

Yes, it is. Hear the author. Read the book.

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