Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found

Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found

By: Marie Brenner  

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Publisher: Picador

Release Date: 2009-04-28

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Boring Waste of Time - Fragmented, hard to follow; boring non-essential pages....I gave up about half-way through....I didn't care what happened to either the author or her brother.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Not Your Typical Memoir - It started when Cain slew his brother Abel. Ever since these Biblical brothers duked it out, siblings throughout the ages have been at war with each other. Of course, not every sibling relationship is one of rivalry. There are countless siblings who are hand-in-glove simpatico. Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found by Marie Brenner, however, is not a symbiotic sibling love letter, but rather a détente treaty.

"Apples and oranges" is how their mother described them. On the surface, this assessment seems apt. Carl was a green tea sipping, gun-toting, right-wing, Texan apple farmer. Marie, in comparison, is a Starbucks quaffing, New Yorker who writes for Vanity Fair and other elite publications. As she states, "Our relationship is like a tangled fishing line. We are defined by each other and against each other, a red state and a blue state, yin and yang." For decades this was the state of their relationship: deep love buried underneath a surface of anger, misunderstandings, and harsh words. However, when Carl is diagnosed with terminal cancer Marie rushes to his side to try and save him and their relationship.

Apples and Oranges is clearly written through Marie's prism. This partly inevitable as she is the author and partly due to Carl's meticulous eradication of his notes and letters. At certain points in the memoir I questioned Marie's assessment of her brother. For example, when Carl sought "`a hard-working individual'" to manage his apple farm, Marie characterized "the ad [as having] . . . the social skills of a blowtorch." Some readers, however, might simply describe Carl's ad as plain-spoken. Still Marie does not spare herself in this memoir and is candid about her own shortcomings.

The memoir is strongest when the relationship between Carl and Marie is front and center. The parallel story of the Brenner family history, while notable and worthy of its own tome, was often distracting. Similarly, the passages concerning the history of apples in America did not move the primary story forward, except to demonstrate Marie's devotion to finding a common ground with her brother.

When the spotlight shines on Marie and Carl's relationship, Apples and Oranges is a compelling read. Few memoirs are as authentic as the passage below:

I love you more than anyone . . . . You are my brother. We are Brenners. Team Carl.
There is no epiphany. There are no final words.
Don't leave me, he says. Tears run down his cheeks. I am sorry for everything.

Apples and Oranges is a lot like real life: messy, complicated, and worth savoring every second.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
A family full of bad apples - Whoa! And you thought YOU had problems with your siblings. Marie Brenner's memoir is a story of her halting attempts to connect with a difficult brother -- and to reconcile herself with the legacy of her fractious family -- after he asks for her help when he is diagnosed with cancer.

My first time through the book, I skipped over many of the stories she tells. My initial reaction was that in a family such as this that actively courts dissention through their words and actions, the rifts that run deep and wide are not surprising, so not all that interesting. It's clear, too, that Marie's brother Carl has some sort of obsessive and/or social disorder that seems never to have been addressed.

I was also put off by Marie's narrative voice. She is the epitome of the urban sophisticate; a journalist, a "know-it-all" as her brother says, a New Yorker. She seems to relish her own obstructionism. She encourages her brother to write, then tells him "God, that is awful." She belittles his attempts at spirituality, mocks his conversion to Chrisitanity, his halting prayers. Can't she even let a dying man come to grips with his own soul?

After I got all that out of my system, though, I went back and read the book more slowly. The stories she tells are breathtaking in their cruelty, particularly the account of her mother's death, when her brother refuses to call Marie to say she is dying, even though she lives five minutes away. "You should have been here!" he admonishes. Marie makes a mad, impassioned dash through the city to the funeral home to say goodbye to her mother.

I found her attempts to resurrect her family history less interesting, even with an infamous aunt who ran with the likes of Frida Kahlo and a grandfather who fancied himself a don and left his wife in favor of his young secretary. And though I grew up in New York State apple country, her many digressions into apple growing made my eyes glaze over. (I would like to taste the Honeycrisps Carl was cultivating, though.)

This highly personal memoir of a family filled with colorful characters may be too much to take all at once. You may not like Marie or Carl or Isador or Anita, but this is the kind of unvarnished, brutally honest story you aren't likely to encounter often. Slow down and savor this book with the kind of care Carl lavished on his apple orchards.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
A Palpable Irony - An interesting and well-written memoir, unsentimental and incisive.

the only thing that really bothered me about this book is that author clearly violated her brother's privacy. he explicitly destroyed all paperwork relating to his life, probably knowing that she would exploit his story, or explore it, for her own purposes.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
A good study of a personal journey to her brother's death - Bumpy in spots and not always simple to follow, however it is a very good book, with real feeling and meaning for others. I hesitate to be critical, because it is obvious she is a fine writer. This was just so clearly painful, it almost seems to me it needed a few years more to sit and "cool" in her mind. Perhaps presumptuous of me, however I would love to hear her speak of it now with a bit of distance. A worthy read.

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