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.
“The point about revisiting the past is that you find new things each time you go,” writes Morrison; “things you missed or didn’t understand … which as you get older you begin to grasp.” His third attempt to understand that past is certainly, in keeping with today’s salacious literary culture, the most revealing. The psychoanalysts he is fond of quoting might say that Two Sisters contains much of the story his earlier books repressed. The well-bred English family we met previously is now shown to have been marred by “alcohol, suicide, depression, blindness, grief” – as well as the secret fact that Morrison senior fathered a third child as the result of an affair (the title’s second sister).
But the greater part of Two Sisters chronicles how Gill, Morrison’s younger sibling by 16 months, descends into a miserable and degrading state of alcohol addiction that’s exacerbated by the trauma of her fading eyesight. Eventually: “She was blind and often blind drunk.” “There is no because”, her brother writes, about the roots of her despair. But the only mystery about Gill’s drinking is that her brother considers it so mysterious.
Another shift over the past three decades of memoir-writing is that it has become a more restless, heterogeneous form. The influence of pioneers such as Geoff Dyer and Emmanuel Carrère has led to autobiographical stories stuffed with extraneous material; Two Sisters follows this trend by including a series of digressions that comprise an almost exhaustive syllabus on brother-sister relationships in literature. When, after one such longueur, Morrison comments that, “All these books about incestuous adult liaisons have nothing to do with our infant closeness or those games of doctors and nurses,” some readers will raise an eyebrow: in that case why include them? The use of foggy cliche – “Truths you couldn’t make up”; “lost to the world”; “times were different then” – also seems to bespeak a desire to defang his story, keeping it at an unthreatening emotional distance.
“I wasn’t that cold,” Morrison insists defensively, worrying whether he might have done more to rescue Gill; “I never hated her.” Repeatedly protesting one’s innocence, of course, does not always produce the intended effect. An uncomfortable fact about telling other people’s intimate stories is that it usually involves traces of betrayal, violation, even hostility. That’s why anyone who is determined to be perceived as a good person is rarely, in the end, a great memoirist.
• Two Sisters by Blake Morrison is published by Borough (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
