KATHRYN HUGHES

‘Gill stayed in Yorkshire, while Morrison escaped to London and the literary high life’

Two Sisters

Blake Morrison

Borough Press €16.99

★★★★★

FEW writers can claim to have affected the literary landscape like Blake Morrison. Thirty years ago, his account of growing up the son of a charismatic, philandering GP in 1950s Yorkshire was a game-changer. And When Did You Last See Your Father? kick-started the seemingly unstoppable trend for confessional family histories.

Morrison, rightly, abhors the term ‘misery memoir’. The worst thing that ever happened to him in that book was when his dad embarrassed him socially in front of the megastar author Salman Rushdie – hardly the sort of thing to call social services about.

Still, his forensic exploration of the secrets and lies that fester in even the most outwardly respectable families opened the cultural floodgates, for better and for worse.

Now, on the anniversary of the book that made his name, Morrison returns to explore his experience of growing up with two sisters. Or to be accurate, one-and-a-half sisters.

While in the first book he speculated that randy Dr Morrison had fathered a child in their picturesque village, now he has the DNA to prove it. Josie, the daughter of the local pub landlady, is indeed his half-sister.

First, there is his full sister to contend with. Gill is a mere 16 months younger than Blake (their mother, also a GP, was from Co. Kerry). Blake never thought of her as a kid sister. ‘She was my coeval,’ he writes.

The book opens on New Year’s Day, 1991, with Gill, paralytically drunk, barely able to stand while Blake tactfully tries to steer her to safety as the rest of the family gets on with the festivities in another room. Gill is drinking herself to death and, indeed, will be dead by the time Morrison starts writing this memoir. She was just 66 and it is a wonder she lasted so long.

In her angrier moments, Gill claimed that she drank because she was unhappy. Her life had gone wrong while Blake’s had gone