Sisters By Daisy Johnson

"September says pretend to be a house, September said." 

This is a story about two sisters and a memory. 

Something terrible has happened, but the young September and July forge their way through the world, caring for each other (and not) in the midst of a strong bond, deep love. 

This is a story that speaks to the sometimes-violent nature of love. 

(Perhaps our first literary introduction to this reality comes from a book I’m sure all of you know: “Don’t go, I’ll eat you up I love you so.”) Love is imperfect; we are always redeeming ourselves.  

There is a strange logic to the world Johnson has built – oneiric, childlike, poetic. Even memory is unreliable. The mind avoids. Flashbacks come unsolicited. Remembrance unfolds. Anxious telling. 

Sisters speaks to our indisputable intersubjectivity with others – we know who it is we are only in relation to the world around us, especially the people we are closest to. 

This book compels many questions:

What are we to do in the face of such imperfection? 

Who are our pillars in time of great pain? 

How might a child shoulder the world?  

And, who are you when your constitutive “other” no longer exists? 

My most favorite passages from the book:

"A house. Slices of it through the hedge, across the fields. Dirty white, windows sunk into the brick. Hand in hand in the backseat, the arrow of light from the sunroof. Two of us, shoulder-to-shoulder, sharing air. A long way to come. This is the year we are haunted. What? The year, as any other, in which we are friendless, necessary only to ourselves."

"Sleep is heavy, without corners, dreamless."  

"September up on the uneven garden wall, balancing, teeth clenched in what might or might not be a grin. The windows shuttered with the reflection of her body and of my face beyond, eyeholes like caverns and, beyond that, our mum leaning exhausted against the bonnet."  

I recommend this book as a somatic experience - it unsettles, it quivers – and a deep reflection. This is a story that may not be our own and yet the confusion of the narrative is one I would wager, perhaps, that we’ve all felt.