Apples and Oranges by Marie Brenner

I stumbled on this book while over at the Women on the Web’s newest section, The BookParty. (Great site, by the way, which I will post about in the very near future!)

It was recommended by a number of the contributors and so I sought out an excerpt to get a feel for the writing. The topic is heartbreaking, a young woman going to visit her dying brother, a brother who she has had a tempestuous relationship with for decades. Did not seem like a book that would be of interest to me. Then I read her words and found myself quickly writing them down on scraps of paper so as not to lose them.

Her cheeks flush like a debutante’s. Her black lace nightgown hangs on a hook in his bathroom. Her eyes gleam with pools of longing . She looks at him as if he is Devonshire cream.

Marie Brenner, a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, Vogue and The New Yorker, has exposed a part of her past that she initially thought too painful to revisit. All I have read are the tiny snippets I can find online and already I am hooked! How succinctly she captures the difficult relationship with her older brother Carl.

He glares. I glare. In that glare is the jolt of our connection, the fierceness of our attachments. We stare at each other hard.

Apples and Oranges has received glowing mentions and reviews in many outlets including The New York Times and the Washington Post.