Apples and Oranges

Apples and Oranges
Marie Brenner
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
ISBN: 978-0-374-17352-4
Non-Fiction, Memoir
Reviewed by Mona Lisa Safai

Marie Brenner has written her memoir,Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found, detailing the tumultuous, strangled relationship between her older brother, Carl and her. After being diagnosed with cancer, she travels to Washington State to spend time with Carl. She wants to understand why they never got along as siblings.
Brenner’s memoir describes their tense relationship. He is the right-wing, eccentric lawyer who gave up his career to grow apples in Washington State. Marie is the “lefty” journalist who surrounds herself with friends from the ACLU. Carl insists that they never understood how the people in this country really think and believe. He praises George W. Bush and has OCD.
Marie needs to reconcile their relationship, so she studied everything about apples, so she would have something to talk about with Carl. She is so frightened of Brenner silences and arguments that she prepares as though Carl is a subject for an interview. By the end, Carl has placed his affairs in order, in his way. With two words: “Go forward” for Marie, he expresses what Marie needs to do in own her life. She unsparingly writes with the heartache of a sister who wanted to connect with her sibling. By writing about him, she has begun let go of the past and follow her older brother’s wise words.