Two Sisters by Blake Morrison review – siblings fatally wounded by childhood

Having written about his father and then his mother, the poet and writer now turns to his sisters in a heartfelt and delicate memorial The poet and writer Blake Morrison has long made a habit of getting to know his closest relatives better only after they have died. I don’t mean this unkindly; in life, I’m sure he’s as dutiful and devoted (or not) as the next person. But there’s no ignoring the fact that the grave seems to release him, spurring his deepest thinking, his best prose and (perhaps) his most assiduous, open-hearted loving. In 1993, he published And When Did You Last See Your Father?, in which he exhumed his dad. In 2002, he gave us Things My Mother Never Told Me, about the several lives of his late mother. And now here he is with a third volume. “If you’re reading this, my sister is dead,” he writes on page seven, for the avoidance of doubt. A better title for this book, in which Morrison turns his attention to his younger sister, Gill, and his half-sister, Josie, might have been The Fallout. At the heart of Two Sisters, after all, lies the story that furnished his first memoir: his father, Arthur, having an affair with a married neighbour called Beaty (Josie was their daughter; born in 1959, she was Blake’s junior by nine years). Once again, we’re reminded that the insistent question “But didn’t you know?” is singularly futile when it comes to relationships, particularly those that are clandestine – the trouble being that the head, the heart and the gut may all say different things at once. You know and yet you don’t know. In his childhood, as he explained first in And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Beaty and Josie were forever in plain sight, cherished friends who regularly joined the Morrisons at their holiday chalet in Abersoch; the likeness between Arthur and Josie was obvious. Yet the words “daughter” and “sister” went unspoken. Only when Arthur, Beaty and Kim (Morrison’s mother) were dead were DNA tests done, the results surprising no one. Continue reading...
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