Apples & Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found by Marie Brenner
Release date:  May 13, 2008 / 265 pp.

First line: Every life has moments that change us forever and make us who we are.

Synopsis (from Nicole Bruce):

As a kid in San Antonio, Carl joined the ultra-right John Birch Society; now he’s thrown over a bustling law career to grow apples and pears in Washington State, home of the world’s most spectacular orchards. 

Marie, meanwhile, left Texas to be among people her brother mocks as “New York libs.” There, she established herself as a world-class journalist (Writer-at-Large at Vanity Fair), author of the “Big Tobacco” exposé that became the Academy Award-winning movie, “The Insider”) and activist.

Research tells us that 52% of brothers and sisters have a close relationship, 12% have no relationship, and 21% are “borderline.” That suggests there’s lots of heat in those relationships — and yet, in our relationship-obsessed culture, the sibling connection gets the least attention.

In APPLES AND ORANGES, My Brother and Me, Lost and Found (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Hardcover, on-sale May 13th), Marie Brenner refocuses her acute journalistic eye on this overlooked topic to explore this personal mystery — her tumultuous relationship with her brother.

Review:  I just finished Apples & Oranges, Marie Brenner’s memoir about her tumultuous relationship with her dying brother, and hope that she is now able to follow Carl’s advice: “Go forward.”  When Nicole Bruce contacted me about reviewing Brenner’s latest, I agreed because she likened Apples & Oranges to the television drama Brothers & Sisters, and then sealed the deal with this quote by Lesley Stahl: 

“APPLES AND ORANGES is genius. It’s the true story of a grown-up brother and sister trying to get along, but always devolving, bickering, always returning to the back seat of the car. Marie Brenner tells her true story with painful rawness and the cold, sure honesty of an x-ray machine. She also tells it with the pen of a poet. It’s the most beautifully written book I’ve read in years.”

I do not agree with either of above opinions.  However, I did enjoy aspects of Brenner’s memoir — it is a very fast read — and hope that it has brought her a sense of peace. 

Apples & Oranges may resonate more fully with people who have difficult relationships with their siblings.  I was a little apprehensive when it became obvious that Carl would be dead of cancer by the end of the memoir — I, too, have lost my brother prematurely (to a car accident).  However, my relationship with my brother was close and very easy — he had the natural ability to always assume the best of people which, not surprisingly, therefore tended to bring out the best in others. 

So, while I empathized with Brenner’s loss, I struggled to understand why she was unable to simply let Carl “be” — be politically right-wing, be an apple farmer, be ornery, be contentious, be private, be OCD, etc.  I actually ended up empathizing more with Carl — despite his irritating qualities —  simply because he was so authentic. 

Now, my affection for Carl is a testament to Brenner’s story-telling, obviously, but so many times I wanted her to just relax a bit.  Instead, she white-knuckles her way into Carl’s life and strong-arms a certain reconciliation — and does seem to be a comfort to him near the end.  However, Carl seemed to be pathologically private, so a memoir revealing the personal details of his last few months left me a bit uncomfortable.  

The focus is so strongly on Marie “fixing” herself that her brother’s journey and wishes seem to be deemphasized to a startling degree.  Now, granted, this is HER memoir, but I felt as if I was trespassing on Carl’s last few months by reading this.

For example, on page 68 Brenner asks herself, “Why can’t I just be easy with my brother, the way I am with my friends?  That we are not close seems a badge of shame, a personal failure, a mark of my inabilities, bossy nature, and tendency to exaggerate.”  This seems to be the core of her search as well as the basis for my ambivalence.  Spending the last few months together seems to be motivated by a desire to “fix herself” before she loses the opportunity, rather than achieve any lasting understanding of Carl. 

As an aside, her judgement of the fashion and sensibilities of the residents of Washington state didn’t endear her to me, either:  “If there is snow on the Blewett Pass, you…will have to stay in the godforsaken town of North Bend…allowing you to make notes on the Pacific Northwest wardrobe color choice — faded raspberry and muted moss — not to mention the T-shirts, shorts and Birkenstocks.  Was there some universal bleaching agent in the Pacific Northwest water that faded out all colors?” (p. 68).  She is insistent on aligning herself with her chosen home of New York City and views most other places, including her homestate of Texas, with a grating myopia.  Fashion critiques of her brother’s chosen home seem petty and strangely trivial, considering her brother’s looming mortality.

But there are aspects of the memoir that I appreciated.  Stylistically, the narrative structure is disjointed, but this appropriately reflects not only her own sense of disconnection from her brother and family history, but the months following 9/11 as well.  So while the narration jumps around quite a bit, this does not impede the momentum of her story.

Throughout the memoir, I was reminded of a new type of therapy I recently saw introduced on the CBS Sunday Morning Show called “cognitive behavioral therapy.”  The theory is that traditional “talk therapy” dwells too much in the past — how and why past events have lead to dissatisfaction with the present — rather than focusing on how decisions in the present moment can therefore improve the future.  I think it was fitting that Carl’s last words included the command “Go forward.”  Hopefully this memoir will allow Brenner to do so.

If you think you would like to give Brenner’s memoir a try, simply leave me a comment below!  If I have more than one taker, I will randomly choose a name and then contact you by email… Have you written a review of Apples & Oranges? Feel free to leave a link!

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