MY SISTER AND OTHER LOVERS

A history of damage and insecurity shapes the lives of two close siblings.

Picking up on the three female characters—sisters Lucy and Bea and their unpredictable mother—from her autobiographical debut, Hideous Kinky (1992), Freud opens this new novel by immediately plunging the reader back into their risky, rackety lifestyle. The family, now expanded to include a young brother, Max, is traveling to Ireland to visit the children’s grandparents, then moves on to stay with other acquaintances there, hitchhiking and scraping by. It’s no different back in England, where the four live for a while in a communal house shared with assorted neighbors, and later in London, as the girls leave home and narrator Lucy attends drama school. Bea, burdened by memories of abuse and abandonment and their mother’s refusal to believe her, conducts a veiled existence, apparently fueled by drugs. Yet, whatever the distance—physical or emotional—between them, the sisters remain close, as Lucy becomes an unsuccessful actor and cycles through a sequence of failed relationships. Freud’s style is episodic and years fly by irregularly, interrupted by richly detailed scenarios—a chaotic Christmas; a trip to New York; a hospital bedside—which often presage another breakup. Men are largely unreliable or faithless (the sisters’ “fearsome, funny” father appears occasionally) and seem unable to satisfy Lucy’s yearning for attachment, continuity, and a place in the world. There’s a monotonous quality to this “and then, and then” narration, as well as the time slips and pattern of appealing men who eventually expose their feet of clay, yet Freud’s storytelling and her bohemian characters exert charm. Best of all, she delivers satisfaction in the book’s full-circle conclusion which connects past and present in several forms, explores abiding psychologies, and addresses the repetitive pattern.

A deft, smart, indulgent work that delivers—finally—its necessary integration.