Once We Were Sisters: A Memoir

Sheila Kohlers memoir ONCE WE WERE SISTERS is a harrowing account of two extremely close sisters who grew up in Johannesburg in a very privileged family. While their fathers great fortune afforded them a life of luxury, they were lacking in love and attention from their parents, but they had each other.

The author shows us their childhood through being cared for by nannies, servants, then off to boarding and finishing schools. Soon after, both sisters marry young and begin families of their own, with many children between them. Maxine, the older sister, remains in South Africa. Sheila moves to Paris.

The sisters stay in close contact, by traveling to see each other in their respective homes and to other destinations. Simultaneously, the sisters are going through difficulties in their marriages. Sheila learns that her husband is having an affair, which he does not intend to give up. Maxines husband, a surgeon, is physically abusing her. And, not just once in a while. Sheila has always been a bit suspicious of him. She tries to intervene by visiting an attorney on her sisters behalf, to no avail, and even their mother is also aware of the goings on.

While the memoir opens and we know that her sister has been murdered, 35 years prior to the book being written, it is of course just as disturbing to read about it now. How does her family cope? How does she function in this world without her older sister? Is she able to heal through her writing?

The author takes us back in time and to the present in a stunning way. It is interesting to learn how a fiction writer has woven her pain into her previous work as a way to express her feelings. It was just a challenging subject. I also felt like a helpless bystander.I do think this is one reason that makes reading interesting.It makes you consider aspects of someone elses situation. As much as I enjoy a memoir, I usually find that there is some sense of closure as the author comes to terms with what propelled themto write or exercisetheir demons from long ago and come to a realization that they share with their readers. I did not gain anything like that from the book although I was compelled to finish it. My hope is that she was able to find peace.

There’s something disturbing about this book, something strangely detached about the way the author tells her family story. It’s part memoir of growing up in South Africa, part travelogue, and part story of what happens when you marry men who probably only married you for your money. In the author’s case, her husband cheated a lot, and her mother-in-law kept telling her she should not leave him, because the author’s inheritance was paying for everything, including her mother-in-law’s home.

In her sister’s case, her husband was a heart surgeon, who also happened to be a nasty child molesting closet homosexual, who beat her black and blue all the time, as well as hit the children. They had six kids, the youngest being three when their mother was killed in a car accident. Her husband was driving, and it was possibly an intentional suicide or homicide/suicide situation. She died, he lived, and his sister got custody of the children, even though the author said she tried to get custody.

Both the author and her mother knew her sister was being regularly beaten. The author would say it was only “later” that she learned all the children’s “accidents” were actually injuries inflicted on them by their father. (There’s no talk of if he molested them, only that he was discovered trying to molest someone else’s son.) Her sister always gave various reasons why she could not leave the marriage, such as her husband had locked up all the children’s passports. The author felt her sister was actually about to leave her husband when she was killed.

All I could think after finishing the book was that I wanted my $1.99 back. Not because I desperately needed the money, but because this was one of those types of memoirs you wished you had never read. You wish you had never encountered a family’s story. As stated earlier, the author tells the story in such a detached way that everything starts seeming disturbing, not just the disturbing parts. Hopefully, I will forget this memoir soon, as so often is the case with contemporary memoirs.

The best book I’ve read in a very long time. Seamless, gorgeously written memoir–spare prose with a subtlety and psychological acuity that renders it far more powerful than a more straightforward approach could have achieved. Kohler, a Sorbonne alum who teaches writing at Princeton, is the award-winning author of fourteen novels, and has outdone herself with this book–an emotional, unconventional murder mystery set against the realities of South Africa, Florence, Paris and New York. Anyone who has a sister (and most who haven’t) will be moved to tears by this story, which is all the more powerful because it’s true.

This memoir is primarily one of domestic abuse, resulting ultimately in the wife’s death – in the view of the author, sister of the dead woman. A subsidiary yet striking feature is the dysfunction in at least two prior generations of the author’s family. The story unfolds in the setting of an upper class family in Johannesburg, South Africa, where lives are both shaped and compromised by events in that country in the second half of the twentieth century; additional scenes in Europe provide insights into the family’s wealth and privilege. The sisters’ bond is strong, and is the source of the author’s need for revenge in the telling of this inevitable tragedy so many decades later. The writing is spare, preventing any sense of the lurid. Sheila Kohler has written many novels, some based on isolated events in this memoir; this book is proof of her ability to transcend the divide between fiction and reality.

Gripping book.

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