Customer Reviews

Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

All her life, Marie Brenner struggled to understand her older brother, Carl. They had very little in common: Carl was a one-time lawyer turned apple farmer in Washington State; Marie was an investigative journalist in New York City, espousing every cultural and political position Carl professed to hate. He was aloof and patronizing, his put-downs cruel and constant; she was never allowed to forget that she did not impress him. How could she break through?

All she wanted was a loving, solid relationship with her only sibling. To accomplish this, she read everything she could find on sibling relationships and entered psychotherapy herself. But Carl remained Carl, unwavering in his unpleasantness, the man who went so far as to go to a performance of Wagner's "The Ring Cycle" rather than attend his only sister's wedding.

Then Carl was struck with a cancer called adenocarcinoma, which has a survival rate of only 11%. Sure that this would be their chance to bond, their last chance, Marie dropped everything in New York and moved to Washington to be with her brother. He accepted her help, in his own way, as she researched treatment regimens and clinical trials, and learned everything there is to know about apple orchards.

Marie also researched their family and uncovered a wealth of genealogical research. While this did not interest Carl, readers will be interested to learn that Marie's aunt, Anita Brenner, was also a writer, an art critic who was integral to bringing Mexican art to prominence in the 1930s. No matter how successful she was in her career, her older brother, Marie and Carl's father, never approved of her. His letters to his sister have exactly the same negative tones of judgment and disapproval as Carl's letters to Marie. Are Carl and Marie this generation's version of an argument that has always been in their family? Are their feuds learned behavior? How do they break the chain?

Carl's emotional difficulties and obsessive work led me to wonder if he had Asperger syndrome. The author doesn't say. He treated his cancer in his own way, going to China and immersing himself in alternative medicine. Carl and Marie grew closer, but not close enough. She couldn't predict what would happen when he ran out of new therapies, and he never told her what he was going to do, his last act of insensitivity.

Marie tells her story with grace, humor and a rare frankness. She is not afraid to share with readers Carl's complaints about her --- desperate to impress, overly dramatic --- and he has a point. There is one photograph of Carl and Marie as children. Marie writes, "He is barely six years old and has already developed the Carl Look." I didn't see any particular look --- just a mildly uncomfortable boy who was nothing like his sister. In the same picture, Marie is smiling and shouting, her energy unmistakable.

It's that energy that comes across in APPLES & ORANGES --- the work she puts into their relationship, the struggle to understand, and the need to write it all down. She questions what a lot of estranged siblings take for granted and won't accept that her troubled relationship with Carl always has to be that way. As Marie found out herself in her research, there isn't very much written on dysfunctional sibling relationships. This honest book is a valuable addition.

--- Reviewed by Colleen Quinn (CQuinn9368@yahoo.com)

In life, there are always people we don't get along with or find hard to understand, but what happens when the person who is hardest to befriend is your own brother? The relationship between siblings lies at the center of "Apples & Oranges." When, in Marie Brenner's case, sibling rivalry is a fundamental part of the brother-sister dynamic, is it possible to change that familial relationship? Even when the situation is desperate?

"Apples & Oranges" chronicles the story of Marie and her brother Carl (as well as other interesting members of the Brenner clan), a relationship that has been contentious almost from birth...or at least dating back to Carl, age 3, throwing his baby sister out the window. Fast forward to adulthood, where the separation of siblings is not only geographical, but entrenched by their vastly different personalities; Carl is a conservative apple grower, living in Washington state, while Marie, a classic New York liberal, makes a living as an investigative journalist for "Vanity Fair." Their worlds could not be more different, so too, their personalities.

As adult siblings, every encounter remains strained. When Carl sends precious fruit from his orchards as a gift to Marie, it comes complete with instructions and follow-up phone calls. Even Carl's decision to share his life-altering secret (a terminal disease) is done by letter to Marie delivered via FedEx and scheduled to arrive after the Thanksgiving holiday. In turn, when Marie decides to fly out to Washington upon learning the news, Carl is not informed ahead of time for fear of sibling rejection.

With such a long way to go, is it possible for two individuals so separate in their philosophies and life styles to come together as family in the face of this crisis? For Marie, it is the only solution. While she can't save her brother's life (despite all her investigative skills--in this case, applied to medical research to save her brother), Marie believes that if she and her brother can somehow bridge the gap that has existed for so many years, it will be enough.

The journey to that place of understanding is the essence of this book, and Brenner has used her unsparing journalistic eye (even on her own behavior) to tell a story that is gripping. For anyone who has ever been frustrated with a sibling, the raw emotion set on the page here will resonate. It's the pebble in the shoe that we live with in our relationships, it's the way of thinking that just seems impossible to understand, it's the human frailty that makes us all the imperfect people that we are.

Christine Zibas, Book Pleasures

This is writer Marie Brenner's intimate memoir about her brother and their incredibly complex and fraught relationship. I find myself overwhelmed with admiration for Ms Brenner, not only for accomplishing the sheer task of getting this book down, laden as it is with generations of family history and scientific and psychological research, but also for the intense struggle she documents as she attempted to forge some kind of common ground, an essential connection, with her very strange sibling.
As the title suggests, Ms Brenner and her brother, Carl, are not at all alike. Chalk and cheese, in fact.
She's an investigative journalist, highly intelligent, happy and successful. He is similarly smart and successful, but also anal and controlling, a cold fish who sends his sister a tray of fruit from his orchards every year with a note that says: 'I picked them myself. Don't give them away.'
A right-wing lawyer from Texas who has in his mid-life moved into growing apples in a big way in Washington State, he has always kept his younger, more lefty, liberal-intellectual sister at more than arm's length. It seems he has no love for her, and his attitude towards her and her smart, New York life is obnoxious and condescending. And really weird. 'You always have to show off and tell us what you know, Carl said.'
Anyone of us in the same boat, faced with such a dour character and such direct put-downs, would be forgiven for turning our back on him. Yet she doesn't cast him off as a bad egg or a black sheep, but instead, when she discovers he has cancer, she puts her life on hold and moves across the country to go into bat for him, hoping to find a way to save his life, and also to spend their last few months together and fix what ails them both.
It must be said that she probably does this as much for herself: in many ways her opinion of herself seems coloured a little by this blighted relationship:

'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. Carl thinks of me as the human flaw.
'I'm going to give you a quiz.
'This is how Carl starts many of our conversations.
'I wish I were kidding.'


Since she is a journalist as well as an author, she digs deep to get to the bottom of what ails them.

'A research study on siblings breaks down the percentages: 52 percent of all brothers and sisters have a close relationship, 12 percent have no relationship, and 21 percent are something called "borderline." I am a borderline, defined by and against my brother, locked into some ancient and immutable feud. There is a moat around our conversations. Why? Why did we spend years locked in struggle with each other? I had to believe there was a chance that some of the answers could be found in the past, in letters and facts and research, in new interpretations of patterns held up to the light. I was operating with a strtict sense of Freudian principles, that the past could yield insights and applicable truths, if only one understood the sexual rivalries, the aggression, the scant affection. I could spin out a sound bite that might make you think I knew what I was talking about, had read the experts on nurture and nature, birth order, peer influence, mirror neurons, attachment theory, DNA.'


The story of these two is a good enough by itself, but what makes this such an extraordinary work is all the other ... stuff .. that she packs into it: information about siblings in modern psychology, about her complicated family, about apples and the entire US apple industry, and about medical science.
It's also touching, a deeply moving book. I loved it.

Either there are more memoirs being published today or my eye has become better attuned to picking them from the stacks and stacks of new books I am exposed to every month. But, while there may be more memoir choices than ever before, finding an honestly written one is still the challenge. And why anyone would want to waste time on memoirs that are less than honest is beyond me.

Marie Brenner's Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found is definitely one of the honest ones. In fact, in its frank discussion of family relationships it reminds me of Mary Gordon's Circling My Mother: A Memoir, perhaps the bluntest, most honest, memoir I have ever read. Neither of these books could have been easy for their authors to write.

The title of Brenner's book is an apt description of the relationship she had with her only sibling, Carl, for so many years. Marie and her older brother simply could not have been more different from one another. Carl, a loner who seems to have been a conservative almost from birth, joined the John Birch Society at age thirteen in their hometown of San Antonio, Texas. Marie, on the other hand, was outgoing and her politics were the polar opposite of Carl's. As Marie describes it, their childhood relationship was a tension-filled one that continued into adulthood even though they were eventually divided by a geographic distance as wide as the one between their political and social views.

Carl gave up the legal profession at age 40 and became a Washington apple grower. Marie became an investigative journalist and "writer at large" for Vanity Fair in New York City. Carl saw her lifestyle and her political views as stand-ins for everything he hated most in the world and he was never reluctant to remind her of that. The two were never really close, and it seemed impossible that they ever would be.

Then came news from Carl that, at age 55, he was suffering a type of glandular cancer with a survival rate of only 11% and that he needed her help. Marie, sensing that she might be running out of time to reconcile her differences with her brother, quickly joined Carl at his Washington orchard where she diligently employed her investigative skills in a quest to find a cure for his illness. At the same time, she tried to connect with Carl in a way, and to a degree, that would lead to the kind of brother-sister relationship she so badly wanted for them.

Apples and Oranges is about family relationships, especially those between siblings, and it explores the strengths and weaknesses that a family can pass from generation to generation. Brenner speaks of the frustrations, hurt feelings and anger that define her lifelong relationship with her brother but, just as importantly, she exhibits the type of love, compassion and understanding that would survive the worst that her brother could throw her way. It is a remarkable book for its honesty and the insights it offers into the nature of sibling relationships and why some work so well while others are doomed to fail.

Bumpy in spots and not always simple to follow, however it is a very good book, with real feeling and meaning for others. I hesitate to be critical, because it is obvious she is a fine writer. This was just so clearly painful, it almost seems to me it needed a few years more to sit and "cool" in her mind. Perhaps presumptuous of me, however I would love to hear her speak of it now with a bit of distance. A worthy read.

Fragmented, hard to follow; boring non-essential pages....I gave up about half-way through....I didn't care what happened to either the author or her brother.

Throughout their lives, author Marie Brenner, a NYC journalist, and her attorney turned Wenatchee Valley orchardist brother's entirely different personalities, political and social views have put them at odds. They are able to come together (at least a little bit); however, after his diagnosis with terminal cancer, as they spend time together at his orchard and team up in search of medical treatment to prolong his life. Although the memoir's subtitle "My Brother and Me, Lost and Found," points to a story about siblings, Ms. Brenner spends a lot of time talking about a paternal aunt who rubbed elbows with famous artists (and whose pear shaped nude backside photo ended up in a museum), complaining about the fact that her family members chose not to inform her (staying minutes away from the hospital) immediately of her mother's death, and providing a plethora of examples of what she perceives as bad behavior on her brother's part, specifically, things like: his unsavory political views, womanizing, and late in life search for spirituality. As an opponent of excessive whining, I wouldn't have even finished reading the memoir except for the many references to familiar landmarks in the Wenatchee area (located in North Central Washington) because of my connection to it (I lived amidst orchards and attended high school in Cashmere). But eventually, even her talk of the area and its people started to stick in my craw - persons poorly dressed, the lengthy boring drive from SeaTac over "the" Blewett Pass (my advice - try taking Stevens Pass next time), the dislikeable quiet, and the too-considerate people (p 191) "I am not good with quaint." Trust me, after a while, hearing the negatives about a place near and dear to ones heart badmouthed gets old. Ultimately, I finished the book, but only to learn what happened to her brother. My advice, skip this book in favor of a better one (like The Mother Garden by Robin Romm, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, or The Good Rain by Timothy Egan) and travel the Cascade Loop one day so you can judge its merits yourself.

Even though your siblings may not have the mental issues presented here, if you have any brothers or sisters, you will probably still be able to relate to the complicated relationship told about in this book and might even help you appreciate the sibling(s) you have. Very interesting reading.

It started when Cain slew his brother Abel. Ever since these Biblical brothers duked it out, siblings throughout the ages have been at war with each other. Of course, not every sibling relationship is one of rivalry. There are countless siblings who are hand-in-glove simpatico. Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found by Marie Brenner, however, is not a symbiotic sibling love letter, but rather a détente treaty.

"Apples and oranges" is how their mother described them. On the surface, this assessment seems apt. Carl was a green tea sipping, gun-toting, right-wing, Texan apple farmer. Marie, in comparison, is a Starbucks quaffing, New Yorker who writes for Vanity Fair and other elite publications. As she states, "Our relationship is like a tangled fishing line. We are defined by each other and against each other, a red state and a blue state, yin and yang." For decades this was the state of their relationship: deep love buried underneath a surface of anger, misunderstandings, and harsh words. However, when Carl is diagnosed with terminal cancer Marie rushes to his side to try and save him and their relationship.

Apples and Oranges is clearly written through Marie's prism. This partly inevitable as she is the author and partly due to Carl's meticulous eradication of his notes and letters. At certain points in the memoir I questioned Marie's assessment of her brother. For example, when Carl sought "`a hard-working individual'" to manage his apple farm, Marie characterized "the ad [as having] . . . the social skills of a blowtorch." Some readers, however, might simply describe Carl's ad as plain-spoken. Still Marie does not spare herself in this memoir and is candid about her own shortcomings.

The memoir is strongest when the relationship between Carl and Marie is front and center. The parallel story of the Brenner family history, while notable and worthy of its own tome, was often distracting. Similarly, the passages concerning the history of apples in America did not move the primary story forward, except to demonstrate Marie's devotion to finding a common ground with her brother.

When the spotlight shines on Marie and Carl's relationship, Apples and Oranges is a compelling read. Few memoirs are as authentic as the passage below:

I love you more than anyone . . . . You are my brother. We are Brenners. Team Carl.
There is no epiphany. There are no final words.
Don't leave me, he says. Tears run down his cheeks. I am sorry for everything.

Apples and Oranges is a lot like real life: messy, complicated, and worth savoring every second.

Whoa! And you thought YOU had problems with your siblings. Marie Brenner's memoir is a story of her halting attempts to connect with a difficult brother -- and to reconcile herself with the legacy of her fractious family -- after he asks for her help when he is diagnosed with cancer.

My first time through the book, I skipped over many of the stories she tells. My initial reaction was that in a family such as this that actively courts dissention through their words and actions, the rifts that run deep and wide are not surprising, so not all that interesting. It's clear, too, that Marie's brother Carl has some sort of obsessive and/or social disorder that seems never to have been addressed.

I was also put off by Marie's narrative voice. She is the epitome of the urban sophisticate; a journalist, a "know-it-all" as her brother says, a New Yorker. She seems to relish her own obstructionism. She encourages her brother to write, then tells him "God, that is awful." She belittles his attempts at spirituality, mocks his conversion to Chrisitanity, his halting prayers. Can't she even let a dying man come to grips with his own soul?

After I got all that out of my system, though, I went back and read the book more slowly. The stories she tells are breathtaking in their cruelty, particularly the account of her mother's death, when her brother refuses to call Marie to say she is dying, even though she lives five minutes away. "You should have been here!" he admonishes. Marie makes a mad, impassioned dash through the city to the funeral home to say goodbye to her mother.

I found her attempts to resurrect her family history less interesting, even with an infamous aunt who ran with the likes of Frida Kahlo and a grandfather who fancied himself a don and left his wife in favor of his young secretary. And though I grew up in New York State apple country, her many digressions into apple growing made my eyes glaze over. (I would like to taste the Honeycrisps Carl was cultivating, though.)

This highly personal memoir of a family filled with colorful characters may be too much to take all at once. You may not like Marie or Carl or Isador or Anita, but this is the kind of unvarnished, brutally honest story you aren't likely to encounter often. Slow down and savor this book with the kind of care Carl lavished on his apple orchards.