Sisters
As if the world needed more memoirs, Mary Loudon has written about her journey to "discover" her schizophrenic sister, Catherine -- after Catherine's death from breast cancer.
I haven't read the book. But I can't help feeling there's something mercenary about finally plumbing the depths of your sister's life after she's gone, particularly when you haven't seen her for many years. The author, Mary, claims Catherine wasn't much into the family, though it sounds as though she had a fairly involved relationship with their parents.
Writers are vultures -- I should know. I comb the carcass of every experience roughly, oh, two seconds after I have it, hoping the shreds will amount to a column, a post, a poem, a video, a book. It's disgusting, and perfectly natural at the same time.
But there are places even I wouldn't go. My sister and I, though we love each other, are kind of estranged, and that's partly my fault. If she dies tomorrow, I won't be writing a book about her, turning her pain into my own. It's not fair. It's not my story to tell.
The few pages of the book I managed to read on Amazon also made me uncomfortable. Mary was the "lucky" sister, pretty and married and smart and a mother and successful writer. "I enjoyed great good fortune," she writes. "It looks as if Catherine and I began our lives in the same place but we didn’t. She had schizophrenia and I did not." There is something smug and kind of icky about all this self-congratulation, even in the context of sympathy. It's as if she assumes her loser schizo sister deserves her pity, when in fact it sounds to me like she lived a pretty okay life for the last 12 years or so.
Anyway, now Mary is the lucky sister again -- in part because she's co-opted the unlucky. Then again, as one of the book blurb reads: "Mary Loudon sets out to learn the story of her vanished sister, but winds up finding herself."
Ew.
Comments
Thanks for calling this one out. Self-congratulatory smugness on the part of a "normal" person regarding someone who suffered from mental illness creeps me out. If fact, it's a damn bitchy thing to do.
Posted by: butterfly | August 24, 2007 07:35 PM
"Writers are vultures".
I love it.
My sister and I are also estranged. A lot of it has to do with my illness, she cannot understand what goes into my head, how I see the world is different than she does.
She is a very successful person in real life, but she can only see black or white, never shades of gray. She cannot understand why anyone would want to hurt themselves, what it is like to hear voices or be depressed when there is no reason to be depressed, or happy when there is no reason to be happy.
She and I went to the Dali exhibit back when it was in Philly and couldn't understand one painting. She doesn't or cannot introspect things. She is spun by a different life.
My heart breaks for her. As I am sure hers does for me. But we are total opposites and even when we are together we have nothing to say.
That is a shame.
Posted by: susan | August 24, 2007 08:44 PM
This sounds like the book that my sister would write about me in that eventuality -- if I still had bipolar but she, not me, was a writer, that is.
As full of disgust and patronizing as this one appears to be. "Ew" is right.
Posted by: Larry Parker | August 25, 2007 03:50 AM
Perhaps the carcass of this experience could produce a book from the opposite view? Maybe not in the same situation, it could be a friend rather than sister for example, but looking at the world of a "normal" through the eyes of the mentally ill sounds interesting to me (though it's possible it would be very boring). Of course there is always the likely hood that you will only find out that the most together person you know is actually a complete train wreck and there really is no such thing as normal.
Posted by: Rhi | August 25, 2007 06:17 PM
I would haunt my sister for the rest of her life say, at 2:30 am everynight.
She could at least have the decency to write while I was alive and share the proceeds, just sayin.
Posted by: ttq | August 27, 2007 01:14 PM
Seems like we all share this sad common thread. My older sister and I have not really spoken in 15 years. It was like a death, a loss for which I have never recovered. But it was a death for a relationship I had looked at through rose colored glasses.
She told me once that I was a mistake that ruined the course of her life.
My true sisters are not mine because of biology, but because of a connection of the soul.
Posted by: JT | August 27, 2007 04:07 PM