Sisters

An opera singer, a farmer, and a bartender walk into a bar. It’s the DiChristina sisters!

Before I was anything, I was a sister. I was the twinkle in my dad’s eye, I was an accident, I was Perri and Patrice’s littlest sister. I burst into the world, tiny chest heaving, pink fists clenched, furious at being ripped from warm nothingness, with my place in the world predefined. The three of us are bound together by strands of DNA knotting around our lanky legs, encircling our spindly fingers. We share the unique experience of being slowly, carefully, lovingly built within our mother like ships in a bottle.

—

Like so many other voracious readers with attention deficit disorder, a good first paragraph is essential. These two books have two of my favorite first paragraphs and I like them so much that I’ll leave them here for you to digest and enjoy.

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalliodes, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

-We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

“My sister is a black hole.

My sister is a tornado. 

My sister is the end of the line my sister is the locked door my sister is a shot in the dark. 

My sister is waiting for me. 

My sister is a falling tree. 

My sister is a bricked-up window. 

My sister is a wishbone my sister is the night train my sister is the last packet of crisps my sister is a long lie-in.

My sister is a forest on fire.

My sister is a sinking ship.

My sister is the last house on the street.”

-Sisters, Daisy Johnson

Both of these beginnings contain so much certainty. Sisterhood is a solid object, not an amorphous idea. My sisters are my sisters are my sisters. Both narrators, Merricat Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle and July in Sisters are tethered to the world by way of their older sisters. Without them, they feel like helium balloons let go, like ephemeral temporary tattoos washed away in the bath. All this sounds lovely and sisterhood is magical, but oftentimes these intense bonds mask the fucked up dynamics between them. Are they connected through interlocked fingers or by shackles?

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by my all-time favorite author Shirley Jackson (I’ll have to write a whole separate essay about her) explores a relationship between older sister Constance and younger sister Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood. They and their invalid uncle are isolated in a huge house after someone poisoned the rest of their family.

Sisters by Daisy Johnson unsurprisingly also follows two sisters, September and July, born (as I’m sure you can figure out) ten months apart. We find them escaping some unknown traumatic event with their depressed mother, who is all but iced out by the girls.

All four sisters are alone together. They need for no one and, in fact, are incredibly weird and off-putting to anyone who dares to communicate with them. Jackson and Johnson use the characters of the uncle in Castle and the mother in Sisters for the same reason. By having an extra, ignored family member in the houses, it’s clear that family is too wide of a lens: blood isn’t thicker than water, but sisterhood is.

Sisters aren’t an uncommon theme in horror: sisters are inherently creepy. Had the twins in The Shining been two boys, you could walk by them without a second glance – boys will be boys! Sisters can either serve as two beings that are freakishly similar, or they’re used as foils for one another, highlighting stark differences between the two. Constance and Merricat are similar, drawn together by tragedy, while July and September ricochet off one another in the wake of their own calamity.

In both novels, the sisters have the upper hand on the reader, doling out slices of information as they see fit and not a moment sooner. Unreliable narration serves the purpose of feeling like yes, the girls are speaking my language, but I can’t really figure out what they mean. The reader feels an itch like they’re missing something; that they’re on the outside looking in.

RATINGS:

Sisters: 3.5/5

Other reviewers called Johnson’s prose heavy-handed and pretentious but for me, all those over-the-top descriptions added to the absence of reality from the story. Others complained about the ending (which I will NOT ruin!) which, you know, to each their own. I liked it!

We Have Always Lived in the Castle: 4.5/5

Freaking masterpiece, Jackson does it again (for the last time, with her last book). The last sentence rules.

Alternatively, I could’ve just posted this as my review.