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Sister is planted firmly in the midwest. The narrator, Abigail, grew up on the fertile farmlands of Wisconsin, watered and sunned by the elemental Catholicism passed down by her devout grandmother. Now 30 years old, pregnant, and living in New York, Abigail begins a journey through the labyrinth of memory. Perhaps the promise of a new life fires a quest for meaning in her old life. Perhaps, for her, becoming a mother means examining what it is to be a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister.
For the last 12 years, Abigail has been a sister without a sibling: sister only to a memory, that of her younger brother Sam, who disappeared one night without warning. Sam was 17 when he went missing, but Abigail and her parents lost him long before. He was a beautiful child: sensitive, creative, and loving. He and Abigail were nearly inseparable: sharing the secretive, messy world of childhood. Listen to the adoration in her voice as she watches him sleep in their shared bedroom: "Sam was still sleeping, his head thrown back so far that his body formed a question mark. Even now, the memory of him frozen in that vulnerable arc fills me with an aching protectiveness, as if he were my child and not my brother."
Unfortunately, Sam was in desperate need of that rotectiveness. Both he and Abigail were tormented by their "accidentally" abusive father, a loud-talking man driven by his own warped manifesto of masculinity. Their father's every interaction with Sam was like an assault; the beating down of a gentle soul to fit a mold hopelessly unnatural. As Sam grew up, malnourished by the self-denying diet provided by a monstrous father and an ineffectual mother, he grew away. Even the bond with Abigail withered and died. His disappearance made the transformation complete.
Sam's absence becomes the only thing Abigail and her parents have in common, yet they nurse three different versions of what he was really like. Each interpretation, however truthful or fantastic, becomes the force that drives them forward and apart. Only after great pain, distance, and coincidence can Sam's memory trigger any hope of reconciliation amongst the estranged family.
Other memories are at work in Abigail's backward scrutiny, and some are not even her own. Witness, for example, how a tragic event of a generation before takes root in the young Abigail and flourishes in the empathic and melancholic climate of her soul. She nurtures an entire shade garden, granting those remembered a kind of immortality.
The life of the rememberer, too, achieves a kind of immortality, as Abigail's keen reckoning is passed down by Ansay to her readers. Sister is a poignant, absorbing tale of the past and present of family and love.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.