My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown
“Nocturnal waking is, for me, deeply unpleasant, accompanied as it is by the worst of thoughts… I have lain awake closely analysing every shameful, weak, and selfish thing I can claim to have done or been. All the ways in which I am a bad teacher, mother, wife, daughter, woman and human parade about the bedroom to scrutinise.”
My Brilliant Sister (2024) is the debut novel from Amy Brown, a New Zealand-Australian writer and teacher based in Naarm/Melbourne. It’s described as a ‘genre-bending’ exploration of the choices women face when (and how) they decide whether to pursue their careers, passions and motherhood. The book is told through the perspectives of three different women: Ida, a mother with a young daughter navigating the pandemic and work; Linda, the forgotten sister of Australian author, Stella Miles Franklin; and a modern-day Stella, a musician struggling through the pandemic and reflecting on her life choices.
While I wouldn’t necessarily agree with the term ‘genre-bending’ for this one, the blend of contemporary storytelling with classical narrative does provide something fresh. Brown moves through the three perspectives in a linear and structured way.
We are first introduced to Ida, who is living through the pandemic and emerging from Melbourne lockdowns. With a young daughter to care for and a career-focused husband, we learn that Ida has sacrificed her own career for their move to the city and finds herself weighed down with domestic life while her husband has time to write – something she’d like more time for herself.
The chapter is broken into short, lightly themed sections that explore different aspects of Ida’s life and thinking:
“I have been swimming twice a week again. The strokes of my stretched arms still cause an abrasive sensation under my ribcage, but the pain isn’t bad; it feels controlled if it occurs while I’m doing something I’ve chosen to do.”
As Ida begins reconciling her needs with her husband, she is drawn to the story of Linda, Stella Miles Franklin’s real-life sister. She decides to write a novel about Linda’s experiences juxtaposed against Stella’s and her stand-out 1901 book, My Brilliant Career. In the process, she begins to fantasise about what her own life might be like if she had a sister of her own:
“I’m startled by how easy it is to imagine this. There’s already a flickering of grief at my loss, like the beginning of a fire.”
Following Ida’s story, Brown then writes the second section of the novel from Linda’s perspective, and at first, I thought this might be a ‘novel within a novel’ scenario, with this section being ‘written’ by Ida. But the section alone explores Linda’s early experiences and desires – we don’t return to Ida.
Linda’s section is the longest of the three, and Brown does an excellent job of stepping into her shoes and examining her thoughts, feelings and formative experiences as a young woman, including the impact of her sister’s more daring approach to life and the societal pressures to follow a preconceived narrative of marriage and motherhood.
“By the end of your first day at school, I understood your complaint of a ‘lifeless life’. It seemed that the nearly nine years I’d lived were not really mine but yours.”
In the final section, we meet a fictional Stella, a contemporary version of Stella Miles Franklin, whose experiences mirror Ida’s somewhat, as she navigates the pandemic years as a musician. Through conversations with her friend, Ana (a young mother) and rekindling a friendship of sorts with an old school friend, Linda (also a young mother), we gain insights into Stella’s experiences of opting out of motherhood and following her creative passions.
The section comes full circle and echoes back to Ida, with Stella fantasising about having a sister and young niece and the meaningfulness of this relationship:
“I’m startled by how easy it is to write this account of something that never happened…There’s already a flickering of grief, like the start of a fire.”
While I can appreciate Brown's approach in detailing the three women’s experiences, I didn’t feel this led me to think or feel anything new about the choices and challenges women face regarding motherhood and their careers.
If anything, it left me thinking how sad it is that the narrative is still very much the same: no matter what women decide, they’ll always feel somewhat like they have ‘missed out’ or become too tightly packed into one box or another. I enjoyed exploring the importance of sisters and sisterhood between women. Still, I felt this was touched on in a very surface-level and traditional way. As a woman who has chosen not to have children myself, and the sister of a woman who has two beautiful daughters, I felt there was more scope to explore the nuances of these topics. The relationship between sisters is incredibly dynamic and more complex than we are often afforded in media and literature.
Overall, My Brilliant Sister is an interesting and engaging read that brings together the well-known ideas and challenges of the themes it explores in a concise and structured way, even though I would have liked to wade a little deeper into these waters.
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
