About the Book:
While Stella Miles Franklin took on the world, her beloved sister Linda led a short, domestic life as a wife, mother and sister. In a remarkable, genre-bending debut novel Amy Brown thrillingly reimagines those two lives – and her own – to explore and explode the contradictions embedded in brilliant careers and a woman's place in the world. Sliding Doors meets Wifedom.
Stella Miles Franklin's autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career launched one of the most famous names in Australian letters. Funny, bold, often biting about its characters, the novel and its young author had a lot in common. Miles went on to live a large, fiercely independent and bohemian life of travel, art and freedom.
Not so her beloved sister Linda. Quiet, contained, conventional, Linda was an inversion of Stella. A family peacemaker who married the man Stella would not, bore a son and died of pneumonia at 25.
In this reflective, witty and revealing novel, Amy Brown rescues Linda, setting her in counterpoint with Stella, and with the lives of two contemporary women: Ida, a writer whose writing life is on hold as she teaches and raises her young daughter; and Stella, a singer-songwriter who has sacrificed everything for a career, now forcibly put on hold. Binding the two is the novella that Linda might have written to her sister Stella – a brilliant alternative vision of My Brilliant Career.
Innovative and involving, My Brilliant Sister is an utterly convincing (and hilarious) portrait of Miles Franklin and a moving, nuanced exploration of the balance women still have to strike between careers and family lives. It gives a fresh take on one of Australia's most celebrated writers and an insight into life now.
Published by Scribner Australia (Simon & Schuster Australia)
Released January 2024
My Thoughts:
This was an interesting novel in terms of structure. It's pretty much three novellas more than one novel, to my mind, connected by theme rather than character or plot. In the first one, we meet Ida, a young mother who has moved to Melbourne for her partner's career. Her career is on the backburner while she mothers and manages the bulk of the domestic duties while juggling a teaching job throughout the Covid pandemic. She feels stranded within her own life, so far from her own mother who is back home in New Zealand, her friends which are also back home, devoting time and energy to a job that is not her passion, but which pays the bills, while her husband devotes endless spare time to his passion, shirking domestic duties and reaping all of the benefits of the unpaid domestic and emotional labour of his partner. This was all too familiar.
In the final one - and I know I'm jumping ahead here - we meet Stella, stage name Miles, a singer from New Zealand who is hunkering down back home through the Covid pandemic, suffering a broken heart, and a career crisis. She's taking time to find herself but appears to be just getting more lost in herself in the process. Contemplating her life against that of her best friend, childless by choice for her career while her best friend has a daughter, a partner, a home, all the trappings. This put me in mind of the whole notion that women always have to choose, that unlike men, society is not structured for us to have it all. We always have to choose. This or that. There is always a sacrifice.
Which brings me to the middle one. The bridge between the two, even though none of the characters in each of the sections intersect. This bridge is a letter, or a diary perhaps, written by Linda Franklin, to her sister Stella Miles Franklin. In it, she shakes out her childhood, her adolescence, her early adulthood, and contrasts it to that of her sister. The compliant second daughter, the homemaker, the delicate one, the one who trod the expected path in comparison to the older, brasher, independent sister. In this piece of writing, Linda seems to know instinctively that she is at the end of her life, despite only being in her mid-twenties and a new mother. It's like the diary/letter is a bold goodbye, a statement of what could have been, a desperate last-minute plea to been seen. I really liked it and found it quite moving.
The middle section has nothing to do with New Zealand but the first and third ones do. In the first, the protagonist is missing her home, Australia just that bit too different from home. In the third, the protagonist is reluctant to leave New Zealand again now that she has been back again and forced to remain on account of the pandemic. She feels that much has become unfamiliar about her home and she seeks a reconnection with the place. The author is New Zealand born but lives in Melbourne now. I felt an infusion of the personal into these two characters.
'Rain, I am learning, is revered in this country. We don't have the same relationship with water in New Zealand. Nor with fire. He was pleased to be leaving the earthquake-prone capital, and feels safer in Melbourne, away from fault lines. But there are other dangers.'
I really enjoyed this novel. There was so much within it to contemplate. Highly recommended.
Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.
Book three of #AYearofNZLit.
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