For most writers, a memoir is a once in a lifetime event, but not for the poet and novelist Blake Morrison. Having already written memoirs about his late mother and father, he has turned his attention to his siblings in Two Sisters (Borough). The book details the life of Gill, his younger sister who died in 2019 from heart failure caused by alcohol abuse, alongside his half-sister Josie, the product of his father’s affair with a married neighbour, whose real parentage went unacknowledged for years. Morrison’s account of their struggles is tender, vivid and achingly sad.
O Brother (Canongate) is another brutal and brilliant sibling memoir in which the Kill Your Friends author John Niven recalls the life and death of his charismatic, troubled brother, Gary, who took his own life in 2010. It’s with both humour and pathos that he recalls his and Gary’s early life growing up in Irvine, Ayrshire, their diverging adult trajectories and the “Chernobyl of the soul” felt by Niven and his family after his brother’s suicide.
