I ordered this book for the Wittliff Collections, after discovering the work of Anita Brenner this fall - author of Idols Behind Altars, an art historical/anthropological text published in 1929 that commissioned Edward Weston to make photo illustrations to accompany the project. Marie Brenner is Anita Brenner's niece and a journalist for publications like Vanity Fair. She touches upon her family history in San Antonio and Mexico in Apples & Oranges, but the memoir is really a recollection and partial homage to Marie's brother, Carl Brenner.

Brenner explores her relationship with her sibling jumping across time, place, and memory; the book is disjunctive, out of sequence - composed of correspondence, emails, and memories of conversations; the reader comes away with little sense of who Carl is as a fully fleshed person. But Brenner admits that she struggles to see her brother in the light that his girlfriends and community do - that to her, he presents rage and guardedness which goes back to their childhood together.

We get a sense of Brenner's writing and research process - the endless questions and audio recordings, the archival research. Her struggle to find generosity and calm through her yoga practice, which are dropped into the narrative at trying moments and seem empty - a grasping at loose straws. The most interesting parts of the narrative are Brenner's attempts to understand Carl's work as an apple grower in Eastern Washington - a career that he picked up after leaving a successful law practice. Brenner's desperate efforts to come to terms with Carl's cancer and failing health also compel - the grief and helplessness with which she is faced when her brother commits suicide rather than die a slow death from cancer.