British novelist Esther Freud, daughter of the painter Lucian Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, has had plenty of compelling life experience to draw on for her work. Nonetheless, she has never written a memoir, because she isn’t, she’s been quoted as saying, “interested in telling the truth”, she’s more interested in “weaving a story out of something that has truth behind it”. Freud’s latest novel, My Sisters and Other Lovers, isn’t autofiction exactly, it’s something less defined: it’s a story inspired by both true and imagined events.
Freud’s debut novel, Hideous Kinky, was written with the same quasi-confessional impulse, the story being a retelling of her childhood, as Lucy, travelling in Morocco with her mother Bernadine and sister Bella – Julia and Bea in the novel. Hideous Kinky was made into a movie starring Kate Winslet, fresh from her star turn in Titanic.
In this new novel ‒ the author’s 10th ‒ we’re back to the point of view of Lucy, though this isn’t a neat sequel to Hideous Kinky. Instead, it’s an unravelling of Freud’s past through the guise of fiction. We move beyond Lucy’s childhood and traverse her teen years to middle age.
With Lucy returned from Morocco and settled in England, we learn about her life in a series of remembered scenes. It’s not a traditional novel with an A-to-Z plot. Freud introduces characters and scenes in a fashion not unlike a memoir or diary, letting the reader catch up or assume or imagine how the characters relate to one another.
The stories of each part of her life are dominated by the man she is in love with, and there are many: an older man at the communal house, Ted Colquhoun, Malcolm, Tim Bosun, Nathan, Zac, Clive, Umar, Lex Maybury. But in the background the tensions between Bea and their mother simmer. There’s been hostility between the two for almost as long as Lucy remembers, and it’s now magnified by the film Bea is making based on their childhood travelling in Spain and Morocco.
Their mother is furious at what the film suggests about her actions and failings as a caregiver, an allusion perhaps to the unease felt by Freud’s own mother after the release of her first novel and subsequent film adaptation. But does the film, or the novel, tell the truth? When we filter our stories through art, where does the truth lie? And now that Freud’s real sister Bella, the fashion designer and host of the YouTube Fashion Neurosis series, is beginning to tell her side of their shared history in her Sunday Stories on Instagram, it begs the question: in a family, whose truth is the most honest?
My Sister and Other Lovers is a dreamy sequence of memories recasting the moments that make up a life; the kisses and near-misses. There’s sadness and grief, lives upended by accidents and miraculous coincidences, and an oddly humorous yet sharply tragic chapter dedicated to the surprise discovery of three half-brothers, sons of Lucy’s father, a fictionalised version of Freud’s own life, with him acknowledging 14 children to multiple mothers.
Freud has a careful, polished style of prose, haunted by real and imagined ghosts. My Sisters and Other Lovers is about love and lust and the terrible and beautiful connection between sisters, and the “hard, sure, selfish way of friendship”. But at its core the novel examines the stories we tell about ourselves, and the stories others tell us too; how these stories sustain us and also how they constrain us.
My Sister and Other Lovers, by Esther Freud (Bloomsbury, $36.99), is out now.
