Our Sometime Sister
A Novel By Norah Labiner

"Combines lively storytelling with Labiner’s unique skill at conveying psychological depth. . . . Equally important to her is the deft mix of cultural references, from old TV shows to Shakespeare’s Hamlet." -Utne Reader

"Labiner, narrating in several distinct and haunting voices, proves herself a metafictional adept. She succeeds in crafting an ambitious, poignant and sharp-tongued novel filled with secrets and ghosts, jealousy and love." -Publishers Weekly

"A book that is at once stunningly literary and personally engaging. A suburban fairy tale, Elsinore castle and all. (Prince Charming not included.)" -Lilith

What do the suburbs of Detroit in the mid-1980s and Shakespeare’s court of Denmark have in common? Is there something rotten in the state of Michigan?

In her brilliant first novel Norah Labiner introduces Pearl Christomo, an elusive, forgetful, ambitious, and talented narrator, herself an aspiring novelist, who finds that the fictions she writes resemble her own life, and that her own life resembles nothing so much as a set piece from Hamlet. Complex and subtle, Labiner’s engrossing book is both a sly joke on and an homage to the coming of age / portrait of the artist genre.

While writing her first book, twenty-five year-old Pearl is haunted by ghosts: scenes from movies and sitcoms, lines from tragedies, and characters from classic and modern literature. She finds that her own story cannot be completely separated from the story of her novel. She sets out to write her own life and places its chapters side by side with those of her novel, allowing the reader to compare and contrast the two worlds. In so doing, Pearl makes all the mistakes that an intelligent, literary, unsophisticated first-time novelist would make. Through a skillful mixture of narrative voices, Labiner creates a story of rewarding density that questions the details of memory and confronts the roles that previous writers have ascribed to women. Sifting through alternating chapters of Pearl’s own story and stories written by Pearl, the reader can always feel the presence of the other, a shadow here, or perhaps an echo, even characters that breach the barrier between the stories.

Pearl’s childhood centers around her relationship with her divorced parents, a materialistic mother who is always searching for something outside her reach and an elusive ghost-like father. After the arrival of her stepfather, a successful writer of popular self-help books, Pearl is exiled to a private school in the isolated Upper Peninsula. While working on her novel in this secluded atmosphere, Pearl discovers that her characters-Hugh Denmark, a reclusive writer; Winston Delacourt, an ‘80s darksider poet; Aaron and Rose, the not-so-perfect couple; Theresa, a bitter and disappointed actress; Mary Clare and Butternut, little sisters spying on the world-all come to resemble players in her own life. Eventually the boundaries between the two narratives tangle and the borders of fiction, dream, and memory are blurred.

In this novel, Labiner struggles with the literary inheritance of her male predecessors, imitating the voices of Shakespeare, Joyce, Nabokov, James, and more, and emerging with her own: sometimes lyrical, sometimes satirical, always charming. She offers the reader a complex exploration of stories, how we tell them, and how they tell us. This is a literary novel in perhaps the fullest sense of the word: it is about writing and about literature, and about the ways in which both can influence and change a life. Our Sometime Sister establishes Labiner as one of the best young writers of contemporary postmodern fiction.

Labiner was named one of the ten novelists who are changing the way we see the world by the Utne Reader.  Our Sometime Sister was featured in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. Labiner’s fiction has appeared in Passages North and The Gettysburg Review. Labiner lives in Minneapolis, MN.

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