scaredofdogsno97

[scaredofdogsno97]

This Blog

Hey guys, this isn't my main blog (that's for my own writing, so check it out if you like poetry), it's the one I use when I want to yap about books I read. I'm hoping to use it more from September, because I'll be taking English lit A-level, so I'll need to actually digest books and this is a good way to do it. I'm always reading something, and would love suggestions-once I'm done, I post whatever I think about it here. Hopefully I've said something interesting-enjoy!!!

[scaredofdogsno97]

Big Brother by Lionel Shriver review

I picked this book up from a wall, so had no idea what to expect, but I really liked it!! Spoilers ahead, TW mentions of food, EDs, weight loss, body image

Plot summary

Basically, this woman has to take in her down-on-his-luck jazz musician brother for two months and he'll live with her, her husband and her two stepchildren. But when she sees him, he's severely overweight. When the time is up, and he has to leave, she makes a deal that they'll live together for a year and she'll help him lose all the weight. Long story short, they manage it, and he weighs what he used to in his prime at the end of the year. But, after this year is up, he swiftly gains back the weight and goes back to his dissatisfying life. AND THEN, the narrator turns around and says-actually, that didn't happen-after the two months, we did no such thing-he never lost the weight, and died at 49 from heart complications.

What I think

So this twist at the end really threw me for a loop as I was reading it, and I thought it was lazy writing at first-just Shriver trying to create a shocking ending for the book, where I thought him gaining back the weight would have been moving enough.

However, as I thought about it, I really like this ending, because it makes sense of so much of the events of the year the narrator describes.

Firstly, the narrator's bond with her brother grows much closer, and they have a genuinely lovely time-this makes sense as a fantasy she would tell herself, as throughout her life, she's been second to him, and kept at a distance through his obnoxiousness and big jazz career.

Secondly, the narrator herself has problems with weight, which are described in, though the lens of my experience at least, very accurate and moving terms of what it means to have a body and observe it. In the hypothetical year, she too looses weight alongside her brother, and in doing so, develops something uncomfortably akin to an ED. After just some light probing from a friend, this disappears and she is able to eat 'normally' again. As I was reading, this struck me as very unrealistic-problems with eating don't go away just like that. However, in retrospect, of course a woman struggling mildly with her body image would not see a hypothetical ED as the horrible thing it is, but as a useful tool to loose those '20 pounds'. She gets unhealthy, achieves her goal, and stops. How convenient, I thought on reading-and then found it really was unrealistic the whole time, and that was the point.

But the main reason the fantasy of her brother's weight loss exists is to distract from his death, due almost certainly to his obesity. The narrator carries guilt for not helping her brother, for not offering hospitality after the two months are up. Naturally, she imagines a world where she did, and in fact was the only person helping him, and succeeded entirely in his dream weight loss-only for it not to have worked, easing her guilt by saying, oh, there was nothing I could have done, so it's ok that I did nothing.

The author's descriptions of food, the guilt of eating and the motivations of healthy living really hit home for me, and I found them genuinely moving-descriptions of the narrator's husband as being a health freak, and the distance it drives between the two of them because he won't eat her food, were almost hard to read in their accuracy. But the narrator herself was brilliantly written-putting herself down at every opportunity, despite her obvious successes in life, her and her brother's disdain for her father (who they both find pathetic and mean) and sister (who they are both very distant from) and her confessions of how she preferred her body at 22, 19-even 15-built up a realistic character who I felt, at the end of the book, really made sense to me. Nothing in this book, by the end of it, was out of place, and I would absolutely recommend it.

(also there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff about family I barely mentioned, so maybe I'll get round to that at some point)