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.)

Author Bio
Marie Brenner is writer-at-large for Vanity Fair. Her expose of the tobacco industry, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” was the basis for the 1999 movie The Insider, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. She is also the author of Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women and the best-selling House of Dreams: The Binghams of Louisville. (From the publisher.)

More
Marie Brenner joined Vanity Fair as a special correspondent in 1984, left in 1992 to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, and then returned to the magazine in 1995 as writer-at-large. Brenner began her career as a story editor for Paramount Pictures’ East Coast offices. She has served as a contributing editor at New York magazine, and has worked as a freelance foreign correspondent, covering the Middle East and Europe.

Brenner became the first female baseball columnist covering the American League, traveling with the Boston Red Sox for the Boston Herald during the 1979 season. Her explosive article on Jeffrey Wigand and the tobacco wars was made into the feature film The Insider, starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino.

Brenner is the recipient of five Front Page Awards and is the author of five books, including Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women (Crown, 2000) and the best-selling House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville (Random House, 1988). Sugarland, a movie based on Brenner’ s February 2001 Vanity Fair article, "In the Kingdom of Big Sugar" is currently being developed by Robert De Niro and Tribeca Productions. (From Vanity Fair website.)

Book Reviews 
Thanks to his sister's new book, Apples & Oranges, Carl Brenner did not succeed in vanishing without a trace. Rather, his life, with all its startling twists and turns, and his singular, sometimes maddening personality are magically conjured for us in these pages, as Ms. Brenner uses the prism of her love and grief for her brother—and her bewilderment too—to create a haunting portrait of him and their family. She has written a book that captures the nervous, emotionally strangled relationship she shared with him for the better part of their lives, a book that explores the difficult algebra of familial love and the possibility of its renewal in the face of impending loss…a beautifully observed and deeply affecting memoir, a book written with the unsparing eye of a journalist and the aching heart of a sister.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


In Apples and Oranges, Marie Brenner has delivered a majestic little book. She deepens a tragicomic story into a meditation on family and fate... In Brenner’s sympathetic portrait, Carl becomes a nuanced conservative character. ‘Sometimes you do not get to understand everything,’ she concludes. Family trumps politics, and Marie comes to accept her brother’s tough love. One day, brother and sister climb ‘through the Galas, up through the Bartletts, the valley stretched out before us. We’re standing in a row of saplings, just planted in this sandy loam soil that he has named after our father. The Milton bloc. ‘This is where I want my ashes scattered,’ he says. ‘Are you listening to me?’ Marie was listening closer than Carl ever imagined. His ashes are scattered throughout this mystical book.
James Panero - New York Times Book Review


At 3, Carl Brenner welcomed his baby sister into the world by tossing her out the window. The family joked that Carl gave Marie the gift of a hard head, an asset fully in evidence—along with her hungry heart—in her memoir, Apples & Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found. More than any other book in recent memory, this one grabs the problem of sibling rivalry by the throat and shakes relentlessly. Carl is dying as the book begins, and Marie, now a celebrated reporter, has found her way back into his life, after decades of soul-bashing standoffs, using her investigative skills to probe the mysteries of his disease—and of their tormented relationship. She may never learn what drove her imperious, obsessive-compulsive, "charm-free" brother to give up a career as a trial lawyer to grow apples in Washington State; or what entrenched family dynamic doomed the siblings to reach for each other only across a "canyon of rage." But it is Marie's furious search for answers that gives this book its power, exposing the sweetness at the core of an embattled love.
O, The Oprah Magazine


"Perplexing" was the family euphemism for Brenner's older brother Carl; the less tactful thought him "unknowable," "charm-free" or plain "weird." At 13, in San Antonio, Tex., where his father owned a discount store, Carl joined the John Birch Society. At 40, he left his career as a trial lawyer to become an apple farmer in Washington's Cascade Mountains. Brenner (House of Dreams) and he were on barely civil terms, but when he was 55, he was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, glandular cancer, and asked Marie for help. She responded, leaving her family in New York to be with Carl, who rejected conventional treatment, and to follow him as far away as China for "scorpion patches," herbs and red meat for "yang deficit." The cancer spread quickly; meanwhile, Marie sought to investigate her family's present and past among her father's feuding siblings, including writer Anita Brenner (who became part of Mexico City's art scene that included Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo). And with this research, Brenner courageously and affectingly plumbs the depths of often complex family and sibling relationships.
Publishers Weekly


Vanity Fair writer-at-large Brenner pens an absorbing account of her fractious relationship with her brother. The granddaughter of a Texas discount-store magnate, the author flinched from the ultra-conventional assumptions of her affluent family. (As a college student in the 1960s, she was chagrined to receive an unrequested package of panty girdles from her mother.) Inspired by the example of her aunt Anita, who ran away to Mexico at age 19, befriended Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and became a freelance writer, Brenner thwarted expectations and forged a successful career in journalism that included a pioneering stint as a baseball columnist in Boston. In the autumn of 2001, she traveled from New York to Washington state, determined to explore long-standing tensions with her ailing older brother Carl, a fiery-tempered trial lawyer who'd left his career to cultivate apples. In deft, nuanced prose, Brenner crafts a saga that is part family memoir, part psychological thriller and riveting overview of the U.S. apple-growing industry. The nonlinear narrative never falters as it moves adeptly back and forth in time. Readers will be captivated by the author's unvarnished yet balanced portrait of her difficulties with a combative sibling who routinely ridiculed her leftist politics and peppered his conversations with tirades about bruised apples and pears. Brenner, who accompanied the ill Carl on a medical research trip to China, details the hurt, hostilities and betrayals she endured with deep compassion and an understanding heart. She also offers vivid examples of the tactics she used to counter her brother's outlandish behavior and belligerence. Foreshadowed in a stylish prose riff, the book's carefully executed denouement still packs a powerful punch. A rich and masterful memoir with great value for aspiring practitioners of the genre, as well as discerning readers.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. Marie Brenner's memories encompass a variety of settings, particularly central Texas, New York, and her brother's Washington orchards. What identities and cultures are captured in each of these settings? Where does she feel most at home? Which locale would you prefer? To what degree does birthplace shape our sense of self?

2. What is the effect of the memoir's timeline, weaving the near present with the distant past? In what way does this structure mirror the way memories enter our lives?

3. What accounts for the tremendous personality differences between Marie and Carl, despite their having had the same upbringing? What may have contributed to Carl's conservatism in the face of a family history that often embraced progressive ideas? In terms of temperament, did Marie and Carl share any similarities?

4. How did the past repeat itself in Brenner family history? How is Marie affected by her research into family lore, particularly her findings about Anita? Who are the most colorful figures in your family's past? How are we shaped by the knowledge of these legacies?

5. In what ways does religion as a cultural institution figure into the Brenner identity? As Marie captures the experience of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States through Galveston, what costs and benefits are ascribed to assimilation, or life as a secular Jew? How does Ilene's approach to Christianity compare to Carl's?

6. Marie describes her sorrowful encounter with her ancestors' correspondence at the Harry Ransom Center, as well as her childhood home, filled with typewriters on which many carbon-copied letters were produced. What does it mean for her to come from a verbal family that left miles of documentation in its wake? Is the truth captured in such documents? Is the quest for answers a defense mechanism, as Marie proposes?

7. Discuss the experience of reading about Carl's beloved orchards and the landscape of rural Washington. What does his enthusiasm for agriculture—and his rejection of the family's apparel trade—say about him? In what ways does the perfectionistic process of nurturing, harvesting, and exporting world-class produce serve as a metaphor for his understanding of life?

8. Speaking before a crowded church, Ilene recalls that "we were going to weave a new family, and no longer be part of the tapestry of brainy squabblers that had ended their time together in silence and separation." What degrees of reconciliation are achieved in Carl's lifetime? What are the greatest hurdles to reconciliation?

9. How did Thelma and Milton, at the helm of the Brenner household, shape their children's lives? What did Marie learn from Thelma about being a woman, and what did Carl learn from Milton about becoming a man?

10. What does having a big brother signify to Marie? How does Carl seem to view the role of his little sister? What binds them together, despite their extreme differences? How does her perception of her brother differ from the way others see him?

11. How does Marie compare to the other women in Carl's life? What qualities does he appear to be drawn to? How do women respond to him?

12. With a reporter's precision, Marie describes the tumultuous emotions with which her brother confronted his illness as he tried both Chinese and western medicine, culminating in a loss of confidence in the possibility for healing. What controls our reaction to fate? What personality traits are reflected in the very different responses Carl and Marie showed to his prognosis?

13. The closing scenes capture a memory of peace and laughter between Carl and Marie as well as the beauty of the acreage he once tended. How will Casey's generation remember Carl's and Marie's? What will this sibling legacy be?

14. Marie's preface begins with an advertising line from a movie trailer: "Every life has moments that change us forever and make us who we are." She observes that, despite the hyperbole, it's a true statement. What were the most pivotal moments she encountered in her life? Which experiences have made you who you are?

15. How did you respond to the psychoanalytic theories described in the book regarding siblings? How would you describe your relationship with your siblings? Do these relationships affect (or reflect) the other interactions in your life—in love, at work, or within friendships?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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