MY SISTER AND OTHER LOVERS, by Esther Freud
The British writer Esther Freud made a big splash and landed a movie deal with her autobiographical debut, “Hideous Kinky” (1992). The novel chronicled the exotic but unsettling year that a footloose 20-something mother spent vagabonding around Morocco in the late 1960s in search of adventure and enlightenment with her two young daughters and insufficient funds. (Its title came from the girls’ catchphrase response to their mother’s escapades.)
Freud’s 10th novel, “My Sister and Other Lovers,” picks up the two daughters’ stories in their teens and early adulthood in 1980s England. It makes clear that the author’s itinerant bohemian childhood — she was raised, along with her sister Bella, by their determinedly unconventional young mother, Bernardine Coverley, with scant support from their father, the painter Lucian Freud — is a literary gift that keeps on giving.
This book benefits from insights gained with the passage of time, and with the passing of Freud’s parents, who both died in 2011. Among its fascinations is the new, harsher light it sheds on some of the Moroccan incidents that were relayed from 5-year-old Lucy’s naïve, incurably optimistic point of view in “Hideous Kinky.”
Lucy again narrates, and still feels caught between Julia, her loosey-goosey mother, and Bea, her punctilious sister, two years her senior. Julia now has a third child, a son, but has left his cheating father, rendering her and her children homeless yet again. Bea, eager to cut free, blames her mother for multiple traumas in her youth, and a childhood that made her feel unsafe. Julia, pulling an Alice Munro, denies the accusations and says, “For Christ’s sake, can we stop going on about the past?”
Freud deftly captures the two sisters as they spin off into risky, unsavory situations and oscillate between estrangement and intimacy. They cycle through shared flats, disappointing boyfriends, drug use, abortions and various occupations, including acting and photography. At each stage, Lucy wonders, “Was this who I was going to be?”
In interviews, Freud has commented that she learned to bend the truth more in her novels after “Hideous Kinky.” My favorite, “Mr. Mac and Me” (2015), involves the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s yearlong exile in a coastal Suffolk village during the First World War. Her most recent, “I Couldn’t Love You More” (2021), imagines the dire turn her unmarried teenage mother’s life might have taken had she sought help from her strict Irish Catholic parents in the early 1960s.
In a deliberate swerve, Freud flips the sisters’ real-life professions here: Bea, Bella’s stand-in, worries about their parents’ reactions to her autobiographical film, which showcases scenes familiar from “Hideous Kinky.” Lucy becomes a fashion designer — like Esther’s sister Bella — rather than a writer.
It seems fitting that the author, a great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, incorporates therapy — including a whopping case of transference — into her narrative as the tool that eventually helps her characters find their footing following their rocky youth.
She also explores a phenomenon many readers with siblings will recognize: divergent memories of the same events. After hearing her sister’s bitter take on spending the holidays with one of their mother’s new partners, Lucy reflects: “Bea’s childhood was almost unrecognizable from my own. I’d loved that Christmas.”
In this short and potent but sometimes meandering blend of fiction and memoir, the road to self-realization is lined with unreliable men, including the narrator’s egocentric husband. The bitter unraveling of their marriage earns particular scrutiny, though the sisters’ absentee father, a master unrepentant philanderer, oddly gets a pass.
Will Freud write another sequel? She certainly has the material. And I, for one, would welcome a novel that delves into the author’s relationship with some of her famous father’s dozen or more other acknowledged children — a subject barely touched on here.
MY SISTER AND OTHER LOVERS | By Esther Freud | Ecco | 228 pp. | $27.99
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