Two Sisters – the new memoir by poet, novelist and critic Blake Morrison – arrives 30 years after his influential And When Did You Last See Your Father? (A second memoir, Things My Mother Never Told Me, followed a little under a decade after the first.) Like the two earlier books, which concerned the author’s parents, Two Sisters has been published after its protagonist’s death. Morrison’s sister Gill, who flits through the pages of those previous stories “like a film extra”, died at 67 of causes related to alcoholism. This latest work completes a kind of eulogistic trilogy about the nuclear family of which the author is now the sole survivor.
As such, it also helps map the development of memoir as a form over the past three decades. And When Did You Last See Your Father? – along with Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes – helped ignite a “memoir boom” that still shows no sign of abating. In that first book’s afterword Morrison fretted about subjecting his family to the prying eyes of readers. But from the vantage point of our more prurient, confession-happy times, it reads like a dignified and dutiful tribute to an extremely ordinary family.
