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Charmaine Chan

Once We Were Sisters
by Sheila Kohler
Penguin Books
In her novels and short stories, Sheila Kohler reimagines her elder sister, Maxine, as different characters – the foreigner with the Botticelli face; the girl who lives with her three maiden aunts in a clifftop house; the woman who has lost a sister and then runs over the brother-in-law who killed that sibling in a car. “Revenge and reversal are sweet … on the page, at least, if not in life,” Kohler writes. Thirty-five years after she lost Maxine – in a suspicious crash in a car driven by her husband – she has produced her first work of non-fiction that explains her “make-believe” stories. Once We Were Sisters is a lean, well-controlled memoir that exposes loving and tortured familial relationships, beginning in apartheid South Africa of the 1940s and 50s, where the girls grew up on a vast property staffed by an army of servants. The tight bond Kohler shared with Maxine, however strong, was unable to save her from a husband who beat her “black and blue” and who would end up killing her. Chillingly recounted, the book casts its characters against a backdrop of privilege, although money also left the women vulnerable and, ultimately, damaged.


Sheila Kohler reflects on her obsession with the sister she lost

The violent and mysterious death of the novelist’s older sibling 35 years ago has been the seed of much of her fiction, as she reveals in this memoir

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The violent and mysterious death of the novelist’s older sibling 35 years ago has been the seed of much of her fiction, as she reveals in this memoir


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The violent and mysterious death of the novelist’s older sibling 35 years ago has been the seed of much of her fiction, as she reveals in this memoir

The violent and mysterious death of the novelist’s older sibling 35 years ago has been the seed of much of her fiction, as she reveals in this memoir