This moment is the beginning of endless years of yearning and regret. It is also the beginning of my writing life. Again and again, I will turn to the page to recapture this moment, my sister’s life, and her spirit.
Quickly thereafter Kohler introduces the suspicion that her sister's husband was the killer. The remainder of the book intertwines past and present, detailing events in the author's relationship with her sister, Maxine.
Kohler is from South Africa, and the two girls spent their childhood on the veld, in a house she describes as a "vast property" kept afloat by an "army of servants." She writes that the injustice of Apartheid was obvious, even at eight. And yet, "no one says much about this: silence, secrecy, and mystery surround us." Later, at the height of political tensions, the author leaves the country to go and find herself.
While Kohler, as she has done in 14 previous books, creates a skilled narrative, she never fully addresses either the murder or this white privilege. Of course, we don't read memoir because the people within are well behaved, but the rear view that writing affords is at times exasperatingly absent. As when she drops in this description:
In reality [Maxine's husband] Carl calls the black female servants into the bedroom to help the “master,” and they are forced to participate in a particularly South African form of wife-beating, holding my struggling sister down on the bed, while he beats her.
There's no scene, nothing to indicate how or when this was learned. Leading up to this moment, there have been only suggestions that the author was even vaguely aware of the husband's abuse as it was happening. More specific details go into describing his molestation of a boy, and sex with a male colleague. Ultimately Sheila advises her sister to have an affair. It is the same terrible advice her mother-in-law has given her. The difference is, the mother-in-law's lifestyle is paid for through Sheila's trust.
Throughout the narrative, Kohler weaves in the various fictionalized plots she's created in her previously published books, stories she created to explain the answers she never got. Told mostly in the present tense, there are no attempts to make excuses. Frustrating as this lack of answers may feel to readers, it can be gratifying — the dreaded patter of psychospeak in memoir has reached epic proportions, and there's almost none of it here. And this is where the book triumphs.
Even the title suggests the fairy tale nature of storytelling, it's not meant to be reportage. Kohler is exploring the vagaries of memory, and leaving me — as the reader — to come to my own conclusion about what it means. I'd tell you, but it's better if you read it and see what you think.
This article appears in Apr 20-27, 2017.