APPLES & ORANGES: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found
Marie Brenner
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Memoir
ISBN: 9780374173524

• Read an Excerpt

All her life, Marie Brenner struggled to understand her older brother, Carl. They had very little in common: Carl was a one-time lawyer turned apple farmer in Washington State; Marie was an investigative journalist in New York City, espousing every cultural and political position Carl professed to hate. He was aloof and patronizing, his put-downs cruel and constant; she was never allowed to forget that she did not impress him. How could she break through?

All she wanted was a loving, solid relationship with her only sibling. To accomplish this, she read everything she could find on sibling relationships and entered psychotherapy herself. But Carl remained Carl, unwavering in his unpleasantness, the man who went so far as to go to a performance of Wagner’s “The Ring Cycle” rather than attend his only sister’s wedding.

Then Carl was struck with a cancer called adenocarcinoma, which has a survival rate of only 11%. Sure that this would be their chance to bond, their last chance, Marie dropped everything in New York and moved to Washington to be with her brother. He accepted her help, in his own way, as she researched treatment regimens and clinical trials, and learned everything there is to know about apple orchards.

Marie also researched their family and uncovered a wealth of genealogical research. While this did not interest Carl, readers will be interested to learn that Marie’s aunt, Anita Brenner, was also a writer, an art critic who was integral to bringing Mexican art to prominence in the 1930s. No matter how successful she was in her career, her older brother, Marie and Carl’s father, never approved of her. His letters to his sister have exactly the same negative tones of judgment and disapproval as Carl’s letters to Marie. Are Carl and Marie this generation’s version of an argument that has always been in their family? Are their feuds learned behavior? How do they break the chain?

Carl’s emotional difficulties and obsessive work led me to wonder if he had Asperger syndrome. The author doesn’t say. He treated his cancer in his own way, going to China and immersing himself in alternative medicine. Carl and Marie grew closer, but not close enough. She couldn’t predict what would happen when he ran out of new therapies, and he never told her what he was going to do, his last act of insensitivity.

Marie tells her story with grace, humor and a rare frankness. She is not afraid to share with readers Carl’s complaints about her --- desperate to impress, overly dramatic --- and he has a point. There is one photograph of Carl and Marie as children. Marie writes, “He is barely six years old and has already developed the Carl Look.” I didn’t see any particular look --- just a mildly uncomfortable boy who was nothing like his sister. In the same picture, Marie is smiling and shouting, her energy unmistakable.

It’s that energy that comes across in APPLES & ORANGES --- the work she puts into their relationship, the struggle to understand, and the need to write it all down. She questions what a lot of estranged siblings take for granted and won’t accept that her troubled relationship with Carl always has to be that way. As Marie found out herself in her research, there isn’t very much written on dysfunctional sibling relationships. This honest book is a valuable addition.

    --- Reviewed by Colleen Quinn (CQuinn9368@yahoo.com)

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