Apples & Oranges (Brenner)

Apples & Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found
Marie Brenner, 2008
Macmillan Picador
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374173524


Summary
How can two people share the same parents and turn out to be entirely different?  Marie Brenner’s brother, Carl—yin to her yang, red state to her blue state—lived in Texas and in the apple country of Washington state, cultivating his orchards, polishing his guns, and (no doubt causing their grandfather Isidor to turn in his grave) attending church, while Marie, a world-class journalist and bestselling author, led a sophisticated life among the "New York libs" her brother loathed.

After many years apart, a medical crisis pushed them back into each other’s lives. Marie temporarily abandoned her job at Vanity Fair magazine, her friends, and her husband to try to help her brother. Except that Carl fought her every step of the way. She trained her formidable investigative skills on finding treatments to help her brother medically. And she dug into the past of the brilliant and contentious Brenner family, seeking in that complicated story a cure, too, for what ailed her relationship with Carl.

Marie Brenner has written an extraordinary memoir—one that is heartbreakingly honest, funny, and true. It’s a book that even her brother could love. (From the publisher.)