Books
Esther Freud
My Sister and Other Lovers
My Sister and Other Lovers is in many ways a sequel to Esther Freud’s first novel, the semi-autobiographical Hideous Kinky, published in 1992. The novel takes up again with the characters from that early work – the narrator Lucy and her older, headstrong sister Bea – as they grow into adulthood, each of them struggling to find ways to come to terms with their disruptive, bohemian childhood, their flighty, impractical mother and the wounds they still carry from their early lives.
When we first meet Lucy and Bea, they are travelling with their mother and infant half-brother to Ireland to visit their maternal grandparents. This is because, as Bea puts it, they have “nowhere else to go”. Their mother has recently separated from Max’s father and is waiting to hear if the family has been accepted into a commune in Sussex. In the meantime, she is effectively homeless. It is a fitting place to begin, not only because this situation is emblematic of Lucy’s mother, Julia’s, tendencies and way of being in the world but also because running between Julia and her parents is an undercurrent of tension, effort, anxiety and regret that Lucy is too young to properly understand.
So much of Lucy’s reckoning across this novel is with her mother’s choices and character, a movement towards understanding the forces and circumstances that shaped her, as an unwed, teenaged mother from rural Ireland in the late 1960s “too terrified” to return home, without real support from her daughters’ father, and barely an adult herself. She must hold this understanding together with the knowledge of the real damage that her mother’s actions and lifestyle wrought on both Lucy and Bea: it is also on this trip that the family witnesses a whelping dog kill its newborn puppies, which Julia explains by saying, “It happens sometimes if the mother is too young” and “they’re doing it for their own good”.
Lucy and Bea’s childhoods are marked by a kind of benign neglect. A recurring motif in the early sections of the novel is Lucy’s wondering if “any of the adults kn[o]w” that she is there. Largely unparented, Lucy seeks out solace in other unsupervised children, in riotous underage drinking and in older boys and men, always looking, she realises later, for an ersatz family and its ties. Bea, who has moved to London as soon as she has come of age, forms intense friendships with other damaged women, sinks into drug use and holds herself distant, as much as possible, from her earlier life.
Despite the darkness of much of its subject matter, My Sister and Other Lovers is a spirited and funny book. Lucy is a wry observer of her surroundings and of other people – Freud has a particular skill in capturing the voices and dialogue of the charismatic and eccentric characters with whom Lucy falls in – and many of her youthful escapades in particular are madcap and relayed with real joy. It’s also a novel of great tenderness. At its heart, always, is Lucy’s deep love for her sister and the complications and frustrations of their relationship as they both try to find their way into the world.
In the early sections of the novel these tensions most often play out in Lucy’s emotional reactions to her wayward sister: the pull between her admiration of Bea’s freedom and charismatic boldness, and her own longing for safety, her unwillingness to pull away from her mother in the way that Bea has done. Later it is Lucy’s desire to reconcile her sister and her mother – the two people she loves best – that creates much of the friction between them. As an adult, Bea is more critical than Lucy of their mother and much less willing to forgive her inattention and inconsistencies. It takes Lucy far too long to realise that this is, in part, because Bea was more profoundly harmed.
The novel sprawls across 30 or so years of Lucy and Bea’s lives, and while its energy and humour propel the narrative in a way that is pacy and gripping, there is some unevenness in its drive. Sections that deal with Lucy’s errant boyfriends or with her own experience of motherhood and the vulnerability of children can move more slowly and feel overly weighted compared with the brisk pace of much of the book elsewhere. Some of the early timeshifts and elisions also have a more disjointed rhythm than that into which the novel eventually settles.
Nonetheless, one of the great pleasures of My Sister and Other Lovers is the subtlety with which Freud traces the gentle shifts in both Lucy and Bea as they age and experience more of the world on their own terms. Their developing confidence in their careers – Lucy as a textile designer and Bea as an actor and filmmaker – and their gradual softening towards something like acceptance, of their own characters and tendencies as well as each other – are especially finely drawn.
Above all else, the novel is an exploration of what it means to have a great love that is founded in shared adversity but still move past and through it – less a reckoning with the past than an acceptance of it. It is about learning how to love gently and with forbearance. It is a novel of deep compassion and grace.
Bloomsbury, 288pp, $32.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 2, 2025 as "My Sister and Other Lovers".
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