rev. of Sister to Sister edited by Patricia Foster

Sister to Sister:
Women Write About the Unbreakable Bond. An anthology edited by Patricia Foster. Anchor Books/Doubleday, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Kathryn Rhett.

For the anthology
Sister to Sister, Patricia Foster has gathered twenty compelling pieces on an essential subject: the relationships of sisters.

Foster writes in her introduction that she opened her eyes one night to see her sister standing in a doorway “watching me just as I was watching her.” She realized that her sister lived in “a narrative that fixed me in the center of her vision, just as I’d fixed her in mine.” One of the anthology’s contributors, Maria Flook, expands on this notion of shared consciousness, stating: “My sister walks ahead of me through these pages. She’s holding a shoe box of scraps, notes with her half of the story.”

It is not surprising, then, to see so many writers in the book dwelling on a sister’s absence, either because of geographical or emotional distance, or illness, or death. Flook’s sister ran away at age fourteen, disappearing for two years, a void that “keeps regenerating like a flowering vine.” Lucy Grealy writes about a twin sister and the bond everyone expected them to have, “about how my sister did not mean for me the things other people told me she should.” Robin Behn’s sister converted to Buddhism, becoming remote and silent, abandoning a shared life of music in which she and Robin played flute together, becoming, for a few minutes, “gods, mutual makers of inviolate time.” Bonnie Friedman’s sister is hospitalized with multiple sclerosis; Louise DeSalvo’s sister committed suicide; Donna Gordon’s sister is homeless. Debra Spark writes: “Cyndy is dead, of course. That is why I wear her black coat now. She died of breast cancer at age twenty-six, a fact I find unbelievable, a fact that is (virtually)
statistically impossible.”

However inseparable sisters are (Foster writes, “My sister has lived so long, so restlessly in my psyche, that it occurs to me only as an aberration that we are not joined”), they do, of course, have separate experiences and destinies. Thus, differences, as well as divergent choices, are explored here: a sister who is less pretty, or more trusted by her parents, or who stays near home, or exiles herself to California. Comparisons, after all, are inevitable. As Bonnie Friedman comments, “A sister’s life interrogates yours, saying, Why do you live this way?”

Along with engaging stories, the anthology offers the pleasures of intellect. Lori Hope Lefkovitz’s “Leah Behind the Veil” cleverly examines the male fantasy of men coming between sisters, from the Bible to Woody Allen’s
Hannah and Her Sisters. Erika Duncan’s “What Is Cinderella’s Burden?” uses good sister/bad sister mythology to deconstruct her experience, in which two sisters switch roles in their adult lives, and their mother parcels out final rewards.

A resistance to finality pulses throughout the book, because no word on a sister can ever feel final; one writer even added an afterword to say that she and her sister had become much closer since she’d written her essay. And yet, the good writing in
Sister to Sister evokes whole, satisfying realities, demonstrated by bell hooks, who describes Saturdays when six sisters and their mothers straightened their hair: “While one of us sat in the chair with her back to the stove, getting her hair pressed, the rest of us gathered at the table to drench white bread in hot sauce and pick tiny bones from the bodies of fried fish, to eat homemade french fries and drink ice-cold pop. Such moments of shared female ecstasy haunt me, linger in the shadows of a grown-up world . . .”

Kathryn Rhett’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The Antioch Review, Grand Street, Ploughshares,
and elsewhere. She is currently editing an anthology called Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis,
which will be published in 1997.