By: Laura Zanky
The decision to write under a pseudonym is itself a statement about the relationship between truth and exposure, between the desire to tell the full story and the recognition that some stories can only be told completely when the teller has the protection of a name that is not entirely their own. Marguerite Duvivier, the Associate Professor in Anatomic Pathology who wrote Middle Sisters, made that decision, and the memoir it enabled is one of the more genuinely honest and more genuinely specific accounts of women’s lives across six generations currently available. The pseudonym is not a retreat from the material. It is the condition that made full engagement with the material possible.
The material is substantial. Beginning in Belgium in 1908, the memoir traces a multigenerational saga that encompasses two world wars, emigration from Europe to America, the specific economics of poverty followed by sudden affluence, and the recurring patterns of infidelity, favoritism, jealousy, and coercion that the book traces without sentimentality and without the protective softening that family memoirs often employ to make difficult truths more comfortable for the people involved. Lydie coerces her vulnerable middle daughter Zilda into a loveless marriage. Zilda favors some of her daughters over others during their formative years and leans on the overlooked Marguerite in her old age. Marguerite marries a brilliant, unfaithful man and spends her adult life navigating the specific complexity of a marriage that is both genuinely extraordinary and genuinely painful.
The secretly kept journals that Zilda maintained and that were discovered after her death give the memoir its most distinctive and most affecting dimension, providing documentary evidence of the interior life of a woman whose public presentation was necessarily managed and whose private record is considerably more candid. Reading her mother’s journals, Duvivier is encountering a version of her mother that the relationship itself, with all its conscious management and all its strategic silences, never fully disclosed, and the experience of that encounter gives the book a quality of genuine discovery that most memoirs achieve only intermittently.
The memoir is also, at its core, a testament to the resilience and power of women amidst adversity, written by someone whose professional life as a pathologist has given her the analytical tools to understand evidence without being overwhelmed by it, and whose personal life as a daughter and granddaughter has given her the love and the grief that prevent that analytical distance from becoming the whole story.
If you believe that the most important family histories are the ones told honestly enough to include the secrets and the favoritism and the infidelity alongside the resilience and the love, Middle Sisters by Marguerite Duvivier is the memoir that tells all of it. Grab your copy on Amazon today and follow a family from Belgium to Amazon through the full complexity of what six generations of women actually experienced.
