On Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors
A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. My mother is my best friend. My husband is my best friend. No. True sisterhood, the kind where you grew fingernails in the same womb, were pushed screaming through identical birth canals, is not the same as friendship. You don’t choose each other, and there’s no furtive period of getting to know the other. You’re part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.
Each with their own addictions to deal with, we follow the Blue sisters a year after their sister’s death. We watch them navigate their way through their grief, addiction, and in finding ways out of questionable decisions.
With the inevitable sale of the apartment they grew up in, we watch them go through their late sister’s belongings and figure out how to properly be sisters again.
A heads up for those who have parental issues though. Their parents are not very good at being parents. Their dad is an alcoholic. Their mom, despite not wanting any children, did her best. When confronted about the reason why they kept on having children, it’s because she believed being a wife and being a mother went hand in hand. Unfortunately, she relied heavily on Avery (her eldest). Avery who had to grow up fast; who chaperoned all of her sisters going to and from a Spice Girls concert at the age of 15 (correct me if I’m wrong, please); who taught all her siblings how to swim; who was told to take her sisters out of the house while their dad was having a fit. Avery who practically raised her sisters.
Overall, I found this to be a good start for my year.
TW: death; drug use; alcoholism; infidelity; addiction; desire to be a mother; parental neglect.
