The Sisters Antipodes

In this enormously compelling memoir, novelist Alison (Natives and Exotics) recounts the strangely definitive reconfiguration of her family when her parents broke up and switched partners and children with another couple they met in Australia. In 1965, when Alison was four and her sister seven, they were living in Canberra, where her father was an Australian diplomat. The family met an American diplomat and his family with two daughters of similar ages–the youngest, Jenny, even shared the same birthday as Alison. The couples were fascinated with each other, and soon the marriages realigned: Alison and her sister moved in with their mother, Rosemary, an Australian teacher, and Paul, the American diplomat, who moved them back to the U.S.; Alison’s father, Edward, now married to Helen, became stepfather to her two daughters in Australia. During the seven years of Paul and Rosemary’s tenuous marriage, Alison, a plucky, boyish, observant child, set out to win Paul’s admiration by her accomplishments, and when she finally saw her biological father again in 1973, it became clear that Alison and her antipodal sister, Jenny, were each harboring the “mass of fantasy, jealousy, and longing that was crucial and would define us.” Alison masterfully delineates the treacherous forms this jealousy would take, especially amid the sexual self-abnegation of adolescence, in a truly unusual, harrowing journey of identity. (Mar.)

In 1965, in Canberra, an Australian diplomat and his wife became fast friends with an American diplomat and his wife. Within months, the couples had split and recombined, the men leaving not just their wives, but also their daughters (two apiece, the older ones the same age, the younger exactly a year apart, their birthday shared), for the women of the other family.

Novelist Jane Alison was the youngest of the four daughters, and The Sisters Antipodes is her stunning memoir of the enduring consequences of this familial rearrangement. Those consequences were particularly severe for her and her stepsister Jenny, whose same birthday and similar name were only the beginning of a long string of painful parallels. Endlessly competing for the love of their lost and shared fathers, seeking an ineffable sense of home in strings of diplomatic postings, the two girls struggled, together and apart, for decades.

In prose both lush and precise, Alison tries to piece together what happened. Intensely self-aware, she captures the confusion of a child dislocated from everything she knows save her mother and sister, the desire of a teenager for the bad boy who only appears in the dark, and the disjunction of a college student who wins Latin prizes by day and drinks herself into oblivion by night. She is also acutely observant of all that surrounds her, from mountains and insects, to houses and apartments around the world, to life as a teenager in 1970s Washington, D.C., with its summer soundtrack of cicadas and racial tensions in the public schools.

As she watches Jenny’s disintegration, Alison comes to understand that her perspective was not the only one, and that her parents—all four of them—tried to address the effects of their actions as best they could. Yet she does not settle for easy answers or rote forgiveness, remaining ever aware of the intransigent complexity of events and emotions. In the end, perhaps, the only conclusive outcome to her family’s story is this wise and beautiful book.

Rebecca Steinitz is a writer in Arlington, Massachusetts.

March 31, 2009 | It has come to my attention, and very likely to yours, that everybody in the country, and quite possibly the world, has a story to tell about his or her screwed-up family background. My own story, which I will certainly tell you sometime, involves the Communist Party, a pornographic anecdote regarding J. Edgar Hoover, the accidental deaths of two of my grandparents, and a woman marrying the same man three times over the course of 50 years.

Even by the standards set by the rest of us, it must be granted that Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and Jane Alison have remarkable stories to tell. They are stories both familiar and strange. Both authors are children of 1960s-era family breakups, and nothing could be more ordinary than that. But in both cases the divorces emerged from their parents’ highly unconventional life choices. Sayrafiezadeh, author of “When Skateboards Will Be Free,” was the product of a failed marriage between an Iranian immigrant father and an American Jewish mother, which is almost enough drama for one life all by itself. Then there’s the fact that he spent most of his childhood and adolescence attached to the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist fringe element of the American left. While the SWP experienced a brief boomlet of prestige and influence in the late Vietnam era, its principal mission throughout the Nixon and Reagan years involved convincing its ever-shrinking, ever-aging membership that it stood “at the vanguard of the class struggle.”

Jane Alison was raised in a globe-trotting diplomatic family, or rather in two different such families, as she conveys in the gotcha opening sentence of “The Sisters Antipodes”: “In 1965, when I was four, my parents met another couple, got along well, and within a few months traded partners.” This was in Canberra, the capital of Australia, where Alison and her sister were born. After this startling switcheroo, they abruptly moved to Washington with their mother and their new stepfather to become Americans. The other couple’s two American-born daughters went off to become Australians with their own mother and Alison’s father. So begins a torturous and complicated narrative of doubleness and disloyalty, spanning several continents, in which Alison haunts and is haunted by her seeming doppelgänger, a girl who shares her birthday and has almost the same name, a girl who is blond and pretty like her and who has stolen her father.

It is very easy for memoirs and biographies to become a list of "and thens". For example – "I was born in Sydney and then I went to school and then I moved to Brisbane and then…", ad nauseum.

So cautious readers approach memoirs with some trepidation.

But in the case of Jane Alison’s haunting narrative of her troubled and complex family, no such reservations are necessary.

Instead of plodding chronologically through her life, she loops around and doubles back, weaving in and out of themes of identity, belonging and dislocation with a novelist’s skill and a surgeon’s precision.

She has a way of rendering the extraordinary in lucid, elegant tones. The first sentence of the book reads: "In 1965, when I was four, my parents met another couple, got along well, and before long traded partners.

The simplicity of the writing belies the terrible hurt and pain that this event triggered, some of it on a very slow burn, in the hearts of two families.

Born in Australia, Jane was the second of two girls to a diplomat father and a beautiful mother. The other family were American, but otherwise the same – in the foreign service, two little girls. The youngest ones (Jane and Jenny) even shared a birthday. They were each other’s antipodes – two bodies pressed together.

After the divorces, the remarrying, the moving half-way round the world, Jane and Jenny settled down to growing up with each other’s fathers, and to a competition for the men’s affections that was as destructive as it was unspoken.

Compelling, poignant and exquisitely put, The Sisters Antipodes is full of the kinds of insights that will linger far longer than the story itself.

To say Jane Alison and Jenny Stuart have much in common would be an understatement. During the 1960s and ’70s, for instance, both their fathers were diplomats, the first Australian, the second American.

“Both men were in their early thirties, tall, slim, and ambitious,” Alison writes in “The Sisters Antipodes.” “(Their wives) were smart and good-looking. Both couples had two little girls the same ages, and the younger girls shared a birthday and almost the same name.”

A few months after their families meet, the men and women trade partners. They divorce and remarry. Their daughters become stepsisters.

In this affecting and profound memoir, Alison looks at the ways in which her life and Stuart’s life converge from the beginning. With a gift for language and imagery, she describes their peculiar situation and the confusion they undoubtedly experienced growing up. She attempts to make sense of it.

When Alison’s mother marries Stuart’s father, Paul, and when her father marries Stuart’s mother, Helen, things change all around for everybody. People, places and labels shift.

Four-year-old Jane and her sister, Maggy, move with their mother and Paul to Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and South America. Five-year-old Jenny and her sister, Patricia, move with their mother and Alison’s father to Asia, the Middle East and New York City. Daughters and fathers stay in touch through correspondence.

“We called our father Daddy in our letters,” Alison explains, “but didn’t say the word much. The girls also called our father Daddy, while their own father they called Father. We called their father Paul. The girls were called the girls, or Paul’s girls, his real girls.”

Two years after the split, each couple has a boy, coincidentally, “babies that consolidated the new marriages and knotted us tighter. Tommy bound Maggy and me by blood to Paul and the girls, and bound the girls to our mother; Nicholas bound us even more to the girls as well as to Helen, and bound the girls to Daddy. Like paper dolls all holding hands.”

The parallels are uncanny, almost eerie. Contrasts between their lives, however, are inevitable, too.

Alison, for example, cannot help but wonder how good the other girls might have it. On a visit to New York when she is 11 and Maggy 14, they go with Helen to the Met, the Frick and the Guggenheim. They eat eclairs and Napoleons in neighborhood cafes. They never get to do these kinds of things, Alison notes, with their own mother.

She cannot shake feelings of abandonment either. How could a father, any father, she asks, leave his girls for someone else’s? Have she and Maggy been so easily and conveniently replaced by Stuart and Patricia? What is it about him, or them? At the same time, she must work hard to win her stepfather Paul’s full affection.

The questions and struggles define much of Alison’s childhood and stay with her for decades to come. They influence the ways in which she views herself as well as the relationships she develops with other men; guys in high school, for instance, and in college. These issues would have a significant impact, she eventually realizes, on Stuart, too.

With remarkable grace and insight, the author examines early upheavals and unfortunate tensions in her most unusual upbringing. She makes “The Sisters Antipodes” a thoroughly compelling and successful read.

Going to Beijing for the first time? You might want to pick up Jan Wong’s A Comrade Lost and Found, a snappy travelogue packaged as a memoir.

Wong is a journalist and third-generation Canadian, the granddaughter of a “coolie” who worked on the Canadian Pacific Railroad. In 1972, disgusted with post-Kent State America and “in love with socialism,” she became one of only two Western students at Beijing University.

During her year there, a Chinese student named Yin had the bad judgment to ask Wong how she might get to study in the United States. The then-20-year-old “Montreal Maoist,” as Wong calls herself, dutifully informed a professor of Yin’s question. Yin was expelled from the university; no one knew what happened to her after that. Wong returned to Montreal, graduated from McGill University, and returned to Beijing in the ’80s and ’90s to work for the New York Times and the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Wong wondered about Yin from time to time, fantasizing that she was suffering somewhere in rural China or, alternatively, had managed to get out and was living happily in Las Vegas. But she didn’t take action until 2006, when she was 53. With her husband and two teenage sons in tow, Wong set out “to find Yin, apologize and try to make amends.”

This is a potentially fascinating story. Fifty years after Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s rise and fall, Americans are still debating the ethics and consequences of “naming names.” Cultures on every continent are struggling to address that legacy and reconcile betrayers and those betrayed under a long list of political regimes.

What happens to individual and collective memory in the aftermath of such psychic trauma? How do today’s Chinese look back on Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution? And how does Wong make sense of her own story – that, although she was “haunted” by “snitching” on Yin as a college student, she didn’t feel compelled to investigate her fate, despite repeated stays in Beijing as a reporter, until she was past 50?

These are just some of the questions that Wong does not answer in her slick, entertaining, and relentlessly flippant guide to Beijing, filled with thumbnail sketches of old comrades now nouveaux riches, their career trajectories, cars, residences, and new neighborhoods. She has four weeks to find Yin among them: Will she or won’t she? And what will happen when she does?

I won’t spoil the ending – just let you know that, though some of the stories Wong tells are funny and some are appalling, her writing is so breezy that it’s hard to care about any of the characters we meet. Beijing and its people, in Wong’s rendition, become a sitcom. We never get beneath the spanking-new surface of things.

Jane Alison’s The Sisters Antipodes, on the other hand, is so deeply felt and profoundly moving a memoir that one puts it down feeling emotionally bruised.

Alison’s writing is so spare and powerful that rather than summarize her story, I quote her opening paragraph: “In 1965, when I was four, my parents met another couple, got along well, and within a few months traded partners. This was in Canberra, where my father, an Australian diplomat, had just brought us home from a posting in Washington. The other couple were American but diplomats too. . . . Both men were in their early thirties, tall, slim and ambitious; both the women were smart and good-looking. Both couples had two little girls the same ages, and the younger girls shared a birthday and almost the same name. This was my counterpart, Jenny, and me.”

The realignment is complete within nine months. Then the American father is posted back to the United States and Jane is 4 when her Australian mother bundles up her daughters and follows him to Washington, D.C. Seven years of letter-writing pass before the Australian father is posted to New York, seven years during which the four “girls” neither see their biological fathers nor hear their voices. “I do not know why,” Alison writes. “Because it was expensive and no one made such calls in those days, or no one thought of it, or maybe because a live line between the two households seemed dangerous, fire.”

As the fathers are posted around the globe, taking their new families with them, Alison describes their circumstances and details the continuing, devastating consequences of loss – loss of father, name, country, accent, culture – especially for the two younger antipodes, as she calls herself and Jenny. Once placed in a bathtub together, foot-to-foot, they grow into fierce rivals on opposite sides of the globe. She links their cutthroat competitiveness and shaky sense of self-worth to “the fact that we’d each been replaced.”

This is a fascinating story from an author gifted, brave, and resilient enough to pursue its literary and psychological depths. Jane Allison writes that she tried for years to turn her family story into a novel but repeatedly failed.

Instead, she has written a groundbreaking, stellar memoir.

AFTER Alice plunged into the earth in pursuit of the White Rabbit, the tunnel “dipped suddenly down” and she began to fall, a fall that seemed likely to end in “The Antipathies”, she thought, where “people walk with their heads downwards”. Although Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are not mentioned specifically in this memoir, there are many oblique references borrowed from Alice’s adventures to show how, in 1965, the writer’s life was turned upside down.

Sometime that year, she tells us, at a party in Canberra, “my parents met another couple, got along well, and before long traded partners”.

“In their early 30s, tall, slim and ambitious”, both men were diplomats, representing the US and Australia. Both women were beautiful in different ways. Both couples had two daughters the same age. The two younger girls, Jane and Jenny, even shared a birthday.

Begun in the tinkling salons of the capital city, the affairs played out on plaid picnic rugs “in glades of eucalypts”, the girls sent off after lunch to find koalas or kangaroos. (That old gum nut.) In the evening, four-year-old Jane would share a bath with five-year-old Jenny, their feet “pressed together and pushing”, the literal meaning, as it happens, of antipodes.

It was during one such session, Jane’s mother told her, that she “stood from sudsing us … stepped to the door, and saw, in the dimness of the next room, my father and Helen embrace”. This information comes at the end of the book and until then the reader, and maybe the writer, are unsure who “did it first”.

It was not long after this incident that, according to Jane’s mother, her husband gave her an ultimatum: “She must file for divorce or he would, because he wanted that woman.”

“There it all is,” notes Alison, “in that raw verb ‘want’.” And that is what this book demonstrates best, the catastrophic consequences of wanting and choosing, the primal indicators of personal worth.

It was decided “after less than nine months” that Jane and her sister, Maggy, would go to live in the US with their mother and Paul, the American diplomat. Jenny and her sister Patricia would stay in Australia with their mother, Helen, and Jane’s father, Edward. Such “miraculous neatness”.

And so dangerous, especially for Jane and Jenny, accidentally twinned, and from then on locked in a battle for ascendancy that would go down to the razor wire.

As much a soliloquy and an elegy as a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes explores painfully the reality and surreality of a child’s divorce. “These things happen: …” remembers Alison, and the grim colon absolves the cliche.

“A father vanishes overnight and turns into paper. Another man appears, his face rough and smelling of cigarettes and scotch when we kiss him, but he’s not ours, this is understood, he belongs to a pair of girls somewhere else.” His “real girls”, girls “we cannot see but this new nonfather sees each time he looks at us”.

Rendered invisible, Alison strives successfully to impress Paul. In turmoil she nevertheless graduates with honours from Princeton, having known intimately a significant proportion of the male student body.

On the other side of the world, Jenny is keeping pace with sex, drugs and blackouts. In a tower above an official Australian residence in Italy, Helen attempts to talk about “all this”. Alison has likened Helen’s personality to the shifting highlights in moire silk, her chilling put-downs masked by “another lovely della Francesca smile”.

On this occasion she addresses Alison’s “perfectly natural” jealousy of her and asks if she could “possibly imagine how hard it had been for her girls to lose their father”. In a notebook Alison comments: “The lack of shame disturbs me.” In a novel she calls herself Alice and tries “writing out this family”, “this impossible story”. Her experience in the tower merges in her mind with the time she nearly drowned, dragging down her rescuer, and she sees Helen and her father as “a pair of people so desperate in the water that they must push down any head to stay up”.

Apart from eliciting her mother’s “few fixed memories”, the writer did not consult her four parents about the split of 1965, the chain of events that sprang from “a single crime” and, like classical myth, brought down “the family, the house”.

An admirer of Lucretius, the Roman philosopher, she has, however, come to appreciate his theory that “life begins” only after one atom collides with another, disrupting the “eternal and lifeless” and creating new, “marvellously tangled” possibilities.

“You need entanglements,” says the writer, who has pitched the tenor of her book somewhere between the intellectual and the gut-wrenching, the damning and the forgiving. Alison the little girl lost a father and a fatherland and everything implicit in this. Alison the woman found and acquired other things, among them knowledge and wisdom. But, decades on, neither can explain “what made these four do what they did”, and this is, essentially and tragically, the cry of a child.

Kathy Hunt is a critic based in rural Victoria.