The Sisters Antipodes

This is a powerful work of art which will leave a permanent impression. I was brought up in a healthy family environment, but I now can more viscerally appreciate the psychological devastation that can be wrought by even subtle abuse. At the same time, we all suffer like the author from feelings, such as her jealousy, that we think we should be above. And we have all encountered people, like the author's father and step-mother, who so strongly project their views, however distorted and self serving those views may be. The memoir's discussion of Alison's early years suffers from a lack of detail, because she just doesn't remember enough, and she made the decision not to include, even with caveats, what others might tell her, like her sister or mother. She compensates, not entirely successfully, with language, although she is a fine writer. I recommend Googling "Jane Alison Louise France" for an update on Alison's life, also viewing the Wikipedia page on her, and Alison's own site - her sister Maggie plays such a small role in the memoir that it was nice to see a link to Maggie's fine crafts on Alison's site. For another brutally honest, very good, but quite different, memoir by a novelist, I recommend Alice Sebold's "Lucky".

Jane Alison writes the way people think and dream. She is the reason I think women usually write so much better than men. This novel is like looking into someone's memory, it's not contrived or calculated. It gives me hope that an author like this is recognized in a world of mediocre art. Julie Blattenbauer Seattle, WA

Jane Alison is one of those rare writers who succeeds beyond measure in describing the human experience with language that perpetually astounds in its artistry and accuracy. I'm blown away by this book's literary merit and by its raw honesty: I'm so glad the author had the courage and talent to write it. The Sisters Antipodes describes spot-on some of my own experiences growing up in a fractured family with step siblings. The author gives voice to what can scarcely be articulated by most of us. Alison is gifted and her story is mesmerizing throughout. I couldn't put the book down. Highly recommended!

This was a riveting read, finished it in almost one sitting. The story itself packs a strong punch: Alison here tells us about the aftershocks of two mirror-image couples swapping partners and continents. There is however a subtext in this book that might be easy to miss--I'll get to that in a minute. Because the story is so unusual and engaging, one might almost forget that this is the author's memoir and not really a chronicle of her parents' partner-swap, as you won't quite get those "swap"-details here. Alison also does not sugar-coat--no rosy reconciliations or neat, bow-tied solutions in this book; this memoir is more gritty, like real life. (Outside of a Disney-certified or (certifiable) movie, estranged families/broken homes/difficult parent-child relations, more often than not remain so--Alison tells it like it is, and I appreciated the candor.) Here's what I got out of it personally: an insightful, visceral look into one person's life story, given the family-split that happened when the author was a child of four. Alison deliberately attempts to look at her life through the lens of this single defining event: such thematic unity, and other features such as the gorgeous, precise, vivid prose Alison the novelist is justly celebrated for, make this book a literary effort, setting it apart from more superficial "mass market" memoirs. Here's the subtext I referred to earlier: reading the book, I think it can be easy to miss how much of a success Alison has made her own life, despite all the dysfunction of home and family--because she remains quite understated about her "victories." Some have written that Alison was being self-absorbed; I don't know about that, but to me the tone was merely retrospective and self-reflective, as one might expect in a memoir. Surely, though, the author was being very modest. All the evidence is in between the lines and on the dust jacket: here's somebody raised in effect without a father, no real priveleges, attends a run-down school where she is bullied constantly, and still ends up at Princeton. She follows it up with a graduate degree from Columbia, writes several well-received and critically-acclaimed novels. How did she do it? With courage. Determination. Will-power. These qualities are evident throughout the book--although nothing is stated explicitly--they can be inferred from the way she responds to the terrible events of her childhood. Deprived of a father's love, she decides she will win it by sheer effort and accomplishments--she wins prizes, gets straight-As, does everything a child could possibly do to impress a parent. What can you expect to learn from it? Personally, reading it with the above subtext in mind, I learned that despite the deepest cracks in your childhood, if you grab hold of your God-given gifts and put your heart and effort into making a life for yourself, you might indeed accomplish some amazing stuff. One other question that seems to be popula

"The freedom to tell each other the stories of ourselves, to retell the stories of our culture and beliefs, is profoundly connected to the larger subject of freedom itself"- Salman Rushdie By far the best memoir I have ever read. What seems like a fictional plot is a true story, which makes it all the more enticing. Range of emotion shaped on the page is extraordinary and realistic.