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Once We Were Sisters: A Memoir, by Sheila Kohler
Download PDF Once We Were Sisters: A Memoir, by Sheila Kohler
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ONE OF PEOPLE MAGAZINE’S BEST NEW BOOKS
“A searing and intimate memoir about love turned deadly.” —The BBC
“An intimate illumination of sisterhood and loss.” —People
When Sheila Kohler was thirty-seven, she received the heart-stopping news that her sister Maxine, only two years older, was killed when her husband drove them off a deserted road in Johannesburg. Stunned by the news, she immediately flew back to the country where she was born, determined to find answers and forced to reckon with his history of violence and the lingering effects of their most unusual childhood—one marked by death and the misguided love of their mother.
In her signature spare and incisive prose, Sheila Kohler recounts the lives she and her sister led. Flashing back to their storybook childhood at the family estate, Crossways, Kohler tells of the death of her father when she and Maxine were girls, which led to the family abandoning their house and the girls being raised by their mother, at turns distant and suffocating. We follow them to the cloistered Anglican boarding school where they first learn of separation and later their studies in Rome and Paris where they plan grand lives for themselves—lives that are interrupted when both marry young and discover they have made poor choices. Kohler evokes the bond between sisters and shows how that bond changes but never breaks, even after death.
“A beautiful and disturbing memoir of a beloved sister who died at the age of thirty-nine in circumstances that strongly suggest murder. . . . Highly recommended.” —Joyce Carol Oates
- Sales Rank: #44087 in Books
- Brand: Penguin Books
- Published on: 2017-01-17
- Released on: 2017-01-17
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .70" w x 5.10" l, .81 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
- Penguin Books
Review
“In the end, this is a memoir of love, sorrow, sisterhood and privilege. It’s also a memoir of the limitations of such privilege—in particular, the inescapable tragedy of being born female in a patriarchal world, where all the money, beauty and breeding cannot protect you from a man who takes what he wants without consequence. Rich, pretty, good Maxine, forever the dutiful doll, died young, and her husband lived to a ripe old age, his atrocities never acknowledged. Until now.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“An intimate illumination of sisterhood and loss.”
—People Magazine (Best New Books)
“Kohler digs into her past for a searing and intimate memoir about love turned deadly. . . . Her powerful story gives a sharp contrast between a sister’s lasting love and the ways society protects a violent man.”
—The BBC (Ten Books to Read in 2017)
“It's fitting that the book is written in the present tense, because [Kohler’s] sister is forever with her. Their relationship changes shape yet lingers, as do the important questions about women and violence.”
—Oprah.com (5 Powerful New Memoirs)
“In this intimate, exquisitely written memoir, the author’s first work of nonfiction, she explores the impenetrable bond that can exist between sisters. . . . In spare, delicate prose, Kohler brings a seasoned novelist's skills to this deeply moving, compelling memoir.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Sheila Kohler has written a beautiful and disturbing memoir of a beloved sister who died at the age of thirty-nine in circumstances that strongly suggest murder. Like all of Sheila Kohler’s prose work, Once We Were Sisters reveals its story by degrees, amid a richly sensuous milieu of South African white privilege and repression. It is a tragic tale, with echoes of cultural sexism and misogyny, yet a triumphant story of a young woman’s liberation from this culture and her emergence as a writer. Highly recommended.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, National Book Award-winning author of Them
“Young Sheila Kohler abandons the time-warp of 1950s South Africa and heads for Europe on a voyage of self-discovery. Her quest to find out what it is that she desires—a quest that will last decades and is recounted with the seriousness it deserves, lightened with touches of dry comedy—ends in the discovery that she is and has always been a writer. The most striking parts of this rich and poignant memoir—rich above all in sensual experience—reflect on the necessary cruelty of the writer’s art, sacrificing the truth of the world to the truth of fiction.”
—J.M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“Throughout her literary career, Sheila Kohler has obsessively tried to find closure and justice for her sister’s untimely death and, finally, in this memoir she has succeeded in coming to terms with the tragedy by movingly recalling their childhood together and expressing her love for her sister.”
—Lily Tuck, National Book Award-winning author of The Double Life of Liliane
“For unto whom much is given, of him shall be much required: this Biblical verse takes on a tragic ring as this memoir of a privileged childhood ends in murder. Sheila Kohler has put together this heartfelt, suspenseful confession with a lifetime’s worth of skill and an abundance of inborn genius.”
—Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story
“Sheila Kohler's writing is visually potent, viscerally compelling, and intensely personal. In Once We Were Sisters she conjures a lost world of privilege, violence, and repression that has chilling parallels in contemporary life.”
—Rebecca Miller, author of Personal Velocity
“This lean memoir cuts straight to the heart of what it is to love—and lose—a sister. Kohler sidesteps nothing; her private rage, regret, heartbreak, and revelation mingle unforgettably with the public shame of apartheid. Once We Were Sisters is an exquisite and devastating book.”
—Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ordinary Light
“To write a first-rate memoir is to encounter a mystery. In Sheila Kohler's brilliantly intelligent, beautifully written, sensually detailed, sexy, exquisitely restrained and shocking memoir, there are several mysteries: Why do we act the way we do? Why are we passive when we should be active, and vice versa? What does it take for a young woman to find out who she is? What griefs, what losses must attend that discovery? How to account for the cruelty and self-indulgence of men, or the willed blindness and guilt of women? 'What is it I have done or failed to do?' the memoirist keeps asking here, and her responses are unfailingly, stringently honest.”
—Phillip Lopate, author of Being With Children
About the Author
Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of fourteen works of fiction including the novels Dreaming for Freud, Becoming Jane Eyre, and Cracks, which was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and made into a film starring Eva Green. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and O Magazine and included in The Best American Short Stories. She has twice won an O'Henry Prize, as well as an Open Fiction Award, a Willa Cather Prize, and a Smart Family Foundation Prize. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
While their father’s great fortune afforded them a life of luxury
By carilynp
Sheila Kohler’s memoir ONCE WE WERE SISTERS is a harrowing account of two extremely close sisters who grew up in Johannesburg in a very privileged family. While their father’s great fortune afforded them a life of luxury, they were lacking in love and attention from their parents, but they had each other.
The author shows us their childhood through being cared for by nannies, servants, then off to boarding and finishing schools. Soon after, both sisters marry young and begin families of their own, with many children between them. Maxine, the older sister, remains in South Africa. Sheila moves to Paris.
The sisters stay in close contact, by traveling to see each other in their respective homes and to other destinations. Simultaneously, the sisters are going through difficulties in their marriages. Sheila learns that her husband is having an affair, which he does not intend to give up. Maxine’s husband, a surgeon, is physically abusing her. And, not just once in a while. Sheila has always been a bit suspicious of him. She tries to intervene by visiting an attorney on her sister’s behalf, to no avail, and even their mother is also aware of the goings on.
While the memoir opens and we know that her sister has been murdered, 35 years prior to the book being written, it is of course just as disturbing to read about it now. How does her family cope? How does she function in this world without her older sister? Is she able to heal through her writing?
The author takes us back in time and to the present in a stunning way. It is interesting to learn how a fiction writer has woven her pain into her previous work as a way to express her feelings. It was just a challenging subject. I also felt like a helpless bystander. I do think this is one reason that makes reading interesting. It makes you consider aspects of someone else’s situation. As much as I enjoy a memoir, I usually find that there is some sense of closure as the author comes to terms with what propelled them to write or exercise their demons from long ago and come to a realization that they share with their readers. I did not gain anything like that from the book although I was compelled to finish it. My hope is that she was able to find peace.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
This book will speak to you!
By writer
I have just read the last page of Once We Were Sisters, and I am sitting in the chair in that submerged state you have when you have just read the last page of a book in which you've been floating. I loved every page, and I feel that I've been spending time with the author in her life. I am very close to my sister Linda, my only sibling, four years younger than I. Because of me, she has become an outspoken supporter of gay rights and has left a church that she felt happy in because they wanted her to sign a paper disavowing gay marriage. All of the people in Once We Were Sisters are now ghosts in the air around me, and I am reluctant to let them go. I have read most of Sheila Kohler's books, and I especially love the last chapter in which she tells us where to find her sister in her other works. Kohler's life has been so different from my own, and yet, where race relations were concerned, a childhood in South Africa, and a childhood in Milledgeville, Georgia, were similar in many ways. And love is love is love. The same with grief. This book is universal, and I have been touched by it.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Masterful
By Reader
The best book I've read in a very long time. Seamless, gorgeously written memoir--spare prose with a subtlety and psychological acuity that renders it far more powerful than a more straightforward approach could have achieved. Kohler, a Sorbonne alum who teaches writing at Princeton, is the award-winning author of fourteen novels, and has outdone herself with this book--an emotional, unconventional murder mystery set against the realities of South Africa, Florence, Paris and New York. Anyone who has a sister (and most who haven't) will be moved to tears by this story, which is all the more powerful because it's true.
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