Our Sometime Sister
Reading Group Guide

PLOT SUMMARY:

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 her fictions 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 a deft mix of pop culture and high art references. This meta novel 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. 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.

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 her literary inheritance, imitating the voices of Shakespeare, Joyce, Nabokov, James, and more, emerging with her own: sometimes lyrical, sometimes satirical, always charming and original. She offers the reader a complex exploration of stories, how we tell them, and how they tell us. This is a literary novel in 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.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. How do the characters in the two novels correspond to and play against each other? How do they play against the characters in Hamlet?

2. How does Pearl’s relationship with and attitude toward her mother change over the course of the book? How does her relationship with her father change? Who seems to be a more important influence in her life?

3. Compare and contrast the different

sexual encounters in the book. Why are some so important and others so trivial?

4. How is it appropriate to have the author’s picture on the cover of the book? How does this design choice reflect the themes of the book?

5. Early in the book Pearl acknowledges that her memory of her own past is flawed. What effect does this have on the rest of the novel? Does Pearl’s own novel seem to grow out of her flawed memory? How does memory relate to creativity?

PRAISE FOR Our Sometime Sister:

"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

" Extraordinary—engrossing and suspenseful . . ."

—City Pages

BIO:

Norah 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 a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and the Minnesota Book Award. Labiner’s fiction has appeared in Passages North and The Gettysburg Review. This is her first novel. She lives in Minneapolis.

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