MY FATHER'S SUITCASE

The daughter of a legendary pilot reckons with her abusive and erratic younger sister in this memoir.

Garden delivers a bruising account of her relationship with her late sister, Anna, as they grew up together in New Zealand. The author states her intention to expose the often-overlooked pain of sibling abuse, highlighting her younger sister’s tirades and cruelties. As girls, the conflict between the two sisters came to a head when Anna—out of control and jealous—stabbed her older sister in the back with the pointed spike of a compass, and, another time, attempted to break through her bedroom door with an axe (“Her assault came out of nowhere and was terrifying”). These violent episodes are just preludes to a relationship defined by toxicity and mental illness well into their adulthoods, marked by physical altercations, verbal abuse, estrangement, and a shocking plagiarism scandal. Periods of peace alternated with violence over the decades as Anna suffered from mental illness, instability, and, for a few years, homelessness—a sharp fall after earning a doctorate and achieving great professional success. As the book continues, it begins to explore the ways that trauma is inherited (the sisters’ father, an eccentric aviator famous for flying solo from England to Australia in 1930 and a volatile crank, passed on abuse from one generation to the next) and the various ways people try to flee their demons. Garden’s memoir is highly readable and filled with surprising twists. As it leaps forward and backward in time, however, and the author expands her purview beyond the sisters’ relationship to include the network of other family members, the memoir becomes unfocused. It works best as a study of the complicated and tragic Anna, and it loses its luster as it pulls away from her, flattening her as a monster viewed from afar.

A wounded remembrance caught between empathizing with and gawking at “sister dearest.”