My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud: Tender, fragmented tapestry of memory
Author
:
Esther Freud
ISBN-13
:
978-1526685209
Publisher
:
Bloomsbury
Guideline Price
:
£18.99
No two siblings experience the same childhood. Birth order, timing, parental circumstances, the quality of attachment – these and other factors combine to shape distinct and divergent realities. Add to this the distorting lens of memory and the past becomes each child's unique mosaic rather than a shared family tableau.
Esther Freud's My Sister and Other Lovers, a sequel of sorts to her semi-autobiographical debut Hideous Kinky, revisits a complex, peripatetic family. The earlier book followed young sisters Lucy and Bea through a wild, rootless childhood in Morocco with their bohemian mother. In this new work, we meet them as adults still attempting to anchor themselves in the wake of an unconventional upbringing.
The novel is a fragmented tapestry of memory, longing and unresolved tension between both sisters and their unpredictable mother. Lucy, the narrator, is lost – isolated, emotionally hungry, endlessly trying to contact her unreachable sister via scribbled notes and unanswered messages. Bea is stubborn and unyielding but equally shaped by their shared past. Their mother remains unreliable, offering only fleeting stabs at stability.
Lucy's attempts to repair the relationship between her mother and sister and to establish order in their world are futile and, in a closing scene, she resorts to rearranging her child's dollhouse.
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In a recent Guardian article, Freud reflected on writing the novel while her real-life sister, fashion designer Bella Freud, began publishing autobiographical vignettes on Instagram called Sunday Stories
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'How strange,' Esther writes, 'to read my sister's interpretation of events ... I am tempted to respond, as she must have been doing for years: 'That's not what it was like!'' This tension between versions of truth, between art and life, beats at the heart of the novel. As an aside, her use of the word 'interpretation' may also be loaded, when one considers their exalted lineage.
The narrative is ragged and deliberately unstructured, but Freud's control is masterful. Her prose is lucid, effortless and evocative. It captures the slippery, often conflicting nature of memory and the subtle devastation of unresolved family wounds.
'They fuck you up, your mum and dad,' Larkin wrote. Freud doesn't argue otherwise – but she also shows how that same damage can fuel creative reckoning. My Sister and Other Lovers is both an act of personal excavation and a meditation on the potential cost of turning life into art.
Chaotic, tender and propulsive, My Sister and Other Lovers is a breathless description of missed connections and half-remembered moments. Like memory itself, it is fractured. And like memory, it lingers long after the last line.
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Irish Times
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Irish Times
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Ozzy Osbourne's fond send-off was the least depressing thing on the news
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Irish Times
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Add in a story that she chanced upon in the news, about a woman with a parasitic worm in her brain, and you start to get the connections that ignite Bertilsson's work. READ MORE In her studio, a mind map charts the links between narrative threads, inner worlds, storytelling, portals to parallel universes, the human condition, bodily sensations, everyday consumerism and collective consciousness. 'My brain is like a container, and when I make work I hope it has enough layers that it can create different meanings for the viewer – that's what I'm striving for.' Bertilsson has been lucky, she says. 'But it's hard. I have a studio in Temple Bar Gallery for another two years, and before that I was in Rua Red . You settle in, and then you have to start shifting again.' Before that she was living in a bedsit and making work in the hallway. Now she divides her time between Callan, Co Kilkenny, and Wicklow, commuting to Dublin by train, which she describes as 'like a green tunnel. Nice, but tiring as well, for sure.' Life as an artist is precarious. Bertilsson spends her commuting time applying for things and writing exhibition proposals, which are tricky: 'I don't know, is it better to go into an imaginary project that doesn't exist yet, or write about something you've already done?' Previously working in restaurants, Bertilsson now supplements her income with screen-printing workshops at Black Church Print Studios , but she has avoided longer commitments because 'if you sign up for something and then you have a project, you need time for the project. [ 'Having a minimum-wage job sucks the life out of my soul': 10 young artists on the challenges they face Opens in new window ] 'My dream,' she continues, 'is to be in the studio working solidly. That's what I am striving for.' Restaurant jobs gave her flexibility, and plenty of context for her work, 'but having a full-time job is a distraction from that dream to come true. I think it can be pretty intense sometimes, you're juggling many balls in the air.' Guilt comes into it: 'Sometimes it feels like you have very little time for the people in your life. Then the time that you're not spending in the studio, you're trying to catch up on your admin, applications, emails, invoices … So you're constantly chasing things just because you don't know what's around the corner. Still,' she concludes, 'It's never ever boring. You can learn and grow so much, it's kind of endless. That's pretty amazing.' Kathy Tynan Kathy Tynan. Photograph: Pauline Toesca, courtesy the artist Currently based at Dún Laoghaire Baths Artist Studios , in Co Dublin, Kathy Tynan shows with the Kevin Kavanagh gallery . Her paintings draw attention to things we might otherwise miss, and to the intimacies of the everyday. For Tynan, an artist ever alert to nuance, chance can change everything. The way the cat in her painting Crumlin Cat was sprawled 'informed how I painted the hand in Bad Dreams, and that had a knock-on effect on the subsequent paintings.' Location matters too. Moving into her Dún Laoghaire studio, but balancing it with life necessities, such as childcare pickups, 'I had thought, I'll paint the sea, and it will be really tranquil, but it has been more about stressed paintings, like painting in a rush. Some of them have worked out really well because of that urgency.' Tynan graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2010; she says she didn't have the confidence to set up a painting practice at the time, 'because there was so much I didn't understand about art history, contemporary art and all the discussions that were going on.' Taking a master's gave her 'a deep dive into art criticism and philosophy', which, she says, helped her to put it all aside and return to painting, which she discovered to be 'experience-based and not intellectual at all. 'I felt like I had permission to go back to it then, because I knew what was going on.' Now she teaches at the college, so 'it has come full circle. It's good to be mentally challenged, and it's good to push back,' she says. When I graduated, I wasn't waiting for these opportunities, I was able to make my own. I don't know if that's possible now — Kathy Tynan 'Having a child changed my sense of time. I'm giving parenting my all, giving art my all, but there are these moments when all the effort comes together. I'm talking to the students – I had always wanted to be a tutor – and there are times when it all synthesises into a good painting. The urgency to make something meaningful has really upped the intensity of my work.' Nudging aside concerns that her new body of work for Faigh Amach is almost too personal, she says instead that she has 'tried to push myself to be a little embarrassing, a little too revealing'. [ From the archive: What do artists need to be creative? From time and space to hope, six tell us what makes them tick Opens in new window ] Graduating during the last recession, Tynan hadn't had a job to lose. 'Rent was lower, and things were happening with artists. We were able to rent spaces, put on our own shows. I didn't have a frame of reference for selling art, but it felt like there were DIY opportunities. And that's how I got a break.' She and a group of fellow artists rented the gallery at Pallas Projects , and also at the Hendrons building on Dominick Street. 'We didn't know a thing, and we were completely unknown, but Kevin Kavanagh came in to see one of the shows, and it piqued his interest.' These days things are harder. Artists ask: what's the process, and how do I get a show? 'I say, 'Apply for a show at Pallas, or there's an open submission at Butler , and sign up to the Visual Artists Ireland bulletin .' But when I graduated I wasn't waiting for these opportunities. I was able to make my own. I don't know if that's possible now.' Emily Waszak Emily Waszak in her studio. Photograph: Evanna Devine, courtesy the artist and Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Emily Waszak , who has Japanese and American heritage, divides her time between Donegal and Dublin, where she has a studio at Fire Station . Originally working in industrial weaving, Waszak came to making art on the death of her husband in the first year of the Covid pandemic. Drawing on the traditions of Japanese ceramics, and weaving, her work explores memory, mourning, ritual and the power of tactile making. Preferring to see Faigh Amach as an 'opportunity to work with two other brilliant artists', rather than as a prize, she says she has found the art world in Ireland tough but supportive. 'There can be a feeling of competition, because you're constantly being judged as an artist, and there's rejection. It can be quite intense, but when you find your people it is a lovely and generous community.' As artists are priced out of Dublin, Waszak points to the need for more development of our rural arts infrastructure. 'The Letterkenny Regional Cultural Centre is an amazing support, but Donegal doesn't have a lot of workspaces for artists.' Emily Waszak: 'We imbue them with meaning, then we receive that meaning back.' Photograph: Evanna Devine, courtesy the artist and Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Quietly thoughtful, she is alert to the different energies of rural and urban life. 'I need quiet. I need my own head. That's not just studio time, it's being in the landscape. But once I'm in the testing phase I need people, and to have other artists around.' While many artists live rurally, cities are also the main places where careers happen. 'To be able to go to openings, performances, talks, and have conversations, in Dublin, and outside of Ireland, I need both things.' Currently taking an Irish-language class, Waszak is alert to the connections in folklores across the globe, describing characters that occur in both Japanese and Irish myth. 'I'm not reproducing culture,' she says of her work. 'I'm taking resonances from what I understand about the world through culture.' Her explorations have led to an understanding of the ways in which many of the tools to deal with the things that afflict us are already here. [ 'I want to be positive': Dublin artist whose home was firebombed in a case of mistaken identity Opens in new window ] For her, a pivotal point was not being able to go to the funeral of her husband during Covid, which she describes as horrific. 'Partly it was so horrific because rituals are what ground us in the world.' This led to explorations of what she terms ancestral technology. 'These are the tools for being in the world that have been left by our ancestors through generations. Some are objects, and some are gestures, acts and ritual. There rituals continue to be passed down as a way of helping ourselves, and the next generations, to deal with our larger, existential understandings.' Objects matter too. 'We imbue them with meaning, then we receive that meaning back, like looking into a mirror. We say, 'Wow, this is amazing,' but it is there because we put it there. An object has a power to hold a gesture, to hold meaning. When you're isolated or grieving – and I think everyone is feeling a bit isolated under late-stage capitalism – you just need something. Sometimes it is easier to begin with yourself in a room, maybe with an object. Then work your way out to people again.' Faigh Amach is at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios until Sunday, September 21st. The artist to exhibit in London will be selected by Southwark Park Galleries ' director and deputy director, Judith Carlton and Charlotte Baker, and will be announced in October
