SHINING A LIGHT ON A FAMILY’S ANGUISH
When I Had A Little Sister Catherine Simpson Fourth Estate €17.00 ★★★★★
When I Had A Little Sister is both a family memoir and a detective story, investigating the most painful of mysteries: why the author’s younger sister Tricia took her own life at the age of 46. At its opening, Catherine Simpson describes how – shortly after her sister’s death in 2013, on the run-up to Christmas – she walked into the bathroom where Tricia had so recently been, and saw four cigarette butts floating in the toilet bowl. Tricia was trying to give up smoking, and had invented restrictions, only allowing herself to smoke in the bathroom. The paradox strikes at the heart: ‘On the night she died she was still trying to be healthy.’
Tricia grew up on a Lancashire farm in the Seventies with Catherine and their older sister Elizabeth, with parents who loved them but were reticent about emotions: ‘We never had a conversation about how we felt.’ The book evokes a vanished way of life. Past traumas had been tamped down: the girls’ father, ‘Dad’, had lost his own mother suddenly. She died in childbirth when he was a boy, and – now an elderly man – he still keeps the postcard she sent him from hospital in Preston while waiting to give birth: ‘Wasn’t Preston lucky on Saturday. I heard it on the wireless. Hope you are doing your best for Daddy.’ After her death, he had to help out on the farm. He was only 12 years old but never went to school again. The author’s late mother was a complex, somewhat eccentric character. She had a beautiful singing voice, and was a keen dressmaker, cook, gardener and hoarder of household gadgets. Yet she was clearly also drained and frustrated by the demands of a farm and a household. ‘Mum’ angrily fenced off whole areas of life from the children and their potential intrusion: family history, specific rooms in the house and even funerals. Catherine, yearning for ‘chat’, instead met charged silences. Although she later escaped them – finding her voice as a writer – it seems Tricia gradually fell deeper into them, becoming increasingly reclusive. Yet Tricia did and does speak here, eloquently, through her extensive diaries, which Catherine found and quotes from.
Where did things go wrong? The author remembers Tricia being happy as a very young girl. Aged about eight or nine, however, she turned markedly withdrawn and sorrowful. Her sisters could never pinpoint a single cause. Events hit her hard, in particular the death of her beloved cousin Elaine, aged 17. Her diary at the time simply said: ‘Elaine died. Too bad to write.’ Nothing more was recorded for two months.
Tricia was tall and beautiful, delighting in stylish clothes; she lived briefly in Vienna, had boyfriends and kept horses. There were hopeful highs, but also terrible lows. She was restless, more permeable than others to grief, and – back on the family farm – her bipolar disorder slid into paranoia and psychosis.
This memoir is about a lost sister, but also things that touch us all: the weight of love, loss and guilt; families and their means of survival; how possessions define a life and where they scatter after death. Simpson’s writing – unsentimental, witty at times – fillets the little details that reveal the profundity and bravery of her sister’s weakening struggle with mental illness: even, near the end, the way Tricia painstakingly dressed up in elegant outfits to attend the local church. I found this book gripping and heartwrenching. It sticks with me still.