BROTHER EPISTLES

A physician reckons with her younger brother’s murder in this epistolary memoir.

In 1992, nine days before his 21st birthday, Monir Hall was shot and killed outside his home in Philadelphia. McManus, who was in her first year of medical school at the time, recalls standing over her brain-dead brother’s body in the hospital. She felt herself facing “two doors, one marked DIE and the other LIVE”—and stepped through the second, she writes, “leaving you behind.” The book is structured as a series of letters addressed directly to Monir, a formal conceit that McManus deploys with disarming intimacy. She writes back through time to reconstruct their shared childhood: growing up poor and Black in North Philly, losing their mother in the early 1980s, then their grandmother—their “second mother”—three years later. She also writes forward, filling Monir in on the decades he missed: smartphones, Black Panther, and the fact that his “Fight-the-Power–By-Any-Means-Necessary very black sister married a white guy,” the father of her now-adult children. McManus’ voice is one of the book’s great achievements; it’s casual, at times prickly, streetwise, and lyrical. She is an acute observer of her unique circumstances: a Black woman who escaped “the ghetto” only to feel “under scrutiny” in her affluent New Jersey suburb and unwelcome when she returns to the old neighborhood, where she is made to feel she’s “done something wrong by making it out.” McManus finds moments of levity and joy, too, such as when she describes her quest to provide her children with the soul-food Thanksgiving of her childhood. Grief here is not a five-stage process but, as she puts it, “a spiral and a repeating loop.”

An affecting tribute to a lost brother and a nuanced portrait of what it means to be Black and upper-middle class in America.