A brother's memoir about survivors' guilt after the deaths of his two sisters

Two Sisters by Blake Morrison (Borough Press £16.99, 283pp)

MEMOIR

TWO SISTERS

by Blake Morrison (Borough Press £16.99, 283pp) 

Family loyalty, family secrets and the love and hate felt by those inextricably linked by blood... these are so much a part of the human condition, they became a staple of Greek drama 2,500 years ago.

Small siblings commonly bash each other over the head rather than share toys; and, as I well know, from the unhappy letters that arrive for my Saturday advice column, parents are distressed because their children don't speak, sisters are at war over a family heirloom, brothers are furious over something trivial.

What do any of us really know about our siblings? In Two Sisters, Blake Morrison tries to understand one sister's drawn-out descent into chronic alcoholism and blindness, and explores the secondary story of the half-sister, who 'grew up in the shadow of a lie'.

Both women effectively killed themselves, and this memoir considers what terrible, murky undercurrents may have steered both lives towards the rapids. It is also honest about survivor's guilt. 

As Morrison is all too aware, there are few things worse than knowing you should feel affection for a sister — when in truth you never really did.

Two Sisters completes Morrison's trilogy begun 30 years ago with And When Did You Last See Your Father?, the complicated story of the marriage of his parents and of his father's affair with 'Auntie Beaty', the wife of the local publican. 

The liaison produced Josie — much-loved by unfaithful Arthur Morrison, who took his two older children to see the strange baby in hospital when she was born. They didn't understand why.

In Two Sisters, Blake Morrison tries to understand one sister's drawn-out descent into chronic alcoholism and blindness, and explores the secondary story of the half-sister, who 'grew up in the shadow of a lie'

That book was a best-seller, which gave 'permission' to many other memoirists to reveal themselves and their families. It also upset his mother very much. No surprise there, nor that decorum bid the author wait until after her death to produce Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002), which placed her centre stage.

Highly intelligent, brow-beaten Kim Morrison would certainly have hated her son's revelations of her personal letters and her compromised life in Yorkshire. But both those books were honest, agonised, controlled and (especially the latter) full of love.

In Two Sisters, Morrison turns his pitiless laser-beam on both his sisters: 'legitimate' Gill, born just 16 months after her brother, 'a bonny baby... cherubic almost — pink-cheeked and with lovely blonde curls'; and 'illegitimate' Josie: the secret, the shame.

What unjust fate led Gill to succeed at nothing, to be punished cruelly by her father, to succumb to a fatal craving for alcohol, and finally die wedged, comatose, between a bed and the radiator? Pictured: Blake and his father with his sister Gill (left).

What do you do when your mistress falls pregnant and you are (as a doctor) a pillar of a small society? Why, you persuade your wife, also a doctor, to collude, to 'deliver the child of her husband's mistress', and then to accept the permanent presence of Beaty and her pretty baby daughter in their family life as cherished friends.

Josie, although never acknowledged, clearly supplanted Gill as the new daughter. But it was not until many years later that the DNA test Josie and Blake agreed to take proved the relationship they had suspected. What led Josie, a diabetic, to hole up in a hotel room and take her own life by means of her insulin pump?

What unjust fate led Gill to succeed at nothing, to be punished cruelly by her father, to succumb to a fatal craving for alcohol, and finally die wedged, comatose, between a bed and the radiator?

In a sense, this memoir is as much about Morrison as his sisters. It shivers with the guilt of 'faithless sons gone south/to the airs and graces of the city' (to quote one of his early poems); the emotional distance of the brother whose literary career took him far from the scenes of childhood.

In his poem Life Writing, Morrison reveals the impetus behind his memoirs: 'You're trying to bring to life what's in your head,/ a story that's discomforting but true . . .'

And one of the uncomfortable truths he faces again and again is that, at times, he had 'been a s**t' to his doomed sister. Yes, he should have 'been warmer to her'.

This book is littered (to a fault) with examples of literary sister-brother relationships, but the Wordsworths, Charles and Mary Lamb, and all the rest do nothing to help us understand poor Gill's addiction. Oddly, Morrison gives us permission to skip all these passages, as if he knows they don't really matter.

What does matter is what he calls the 'solace of commonality'. There are many of us who recognise the survivor's guilt, ache at recalling how their shadow darkened the life of an 'under-achiever' sibling.

Like Morrison, we wonder: 'Why didn't you meet more, speak more, tell them you loved them (assuming you did)? If you had, might you have saved them?'

No, is surely the answer — and I so hope this painful, hesitant, honest book will now liberate its author from the past.