The Sisters Antipodes
A Memoir
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A wrenching, luminous memoir” of how betrayal and divorce transformed two families and the lives of two young women (People).
When Jane Alison was a child, her family met another that seemed like its mirror. Each had a father in the Foreign Service, a beautiful mother, and two little girls. The younger two—one of them Jane—even shared a birthday.
With so much in common, the two families quickly became inseparable. Within months, affairs had ignited between the adults, and before long the pairs had exchanged partners—divorced, remarried, and moved on. As if in a cataclysm of nature, two families were ripped asunder, and two new ones were formed. Two pairs of girls were left in shock, a “silent, numb shock, like a crack inside stone, not enough to split it but inside, quietly fissuring.” And Jane and her stepsister were thrown into a state of wordless combat for the love of their fathers.
This true story of their rivalry, and the tragic loss that ultimately followed, is a fascinating record of how adult behavior can shape, or shatter, a childhood. Spanning from Australia to the United States, it is “enormously compelling . . . [A] harrowing journey of identity” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this enormously compelling memoir, novelist Alison (Natives and Exotics) recounts the strangely definitive reconfiguration of her family when her parents broke up and switched partners and children with another couple they met in Australia. In 1965, when Alison was four and her sister seven, they were living in Canberra, where her father was an Australian diplomat. The family met an American diplomat and his family with two daughters of similar ages the youngest, Jenny, even shared the same birthday as Alison. The couples were fascinated with each other, and soon the marriages realigned: Alison and her sister moved in with their mother, Rosemary, an Australian teacher, and Paul, the American diplomat, who moved them back to the U.S.; Alison's father, Edward, now married to Helen, became stepfather to her two daughters in Australia. During the seven years of Paul and Rosemary's tenuous marriage, Alison, a plucky, boyish, observant child, set out to win Paul's admiration by her accomplishments, and when she finally saw her biological father again in 1973, it became clear that Alison and her antipodal sister, Jenny, were each harboring the "mass of fantasy, jealousy, and longing that was crucial and would define us." Alison masterfully delineates the treacherous forms this jealousy would take, especially amid the sexual self-abnegation of adolescence, in a truly unusual, harrowing journey of identity.
