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For most of my life, whenever I heard a woman claim to be “best friends” with her sisters, I’d smile sadly at her, then change the subject. Obviously this meant she’d been home schooled or locked in a basement for much of her childhood. Obviously, I was desperately jealous. I wanted to be closer with my two sisters and spent years trying to mold myself into the kind of girl I imagined they’d want to be near. I embraced their hobbies (lying to our mother and ballet). I pledged allegiance to their favorite bands (Elvis and Jeff Buckley). I regurgitated their ideas (tan lines were awful and I was annoying). But at 17, after getting caught up in a fist fight between them (one came home with the other’s ex-boyfriend’s name tattooed on her bicep), I gave up. What I never could have foreseen was that the unity I yearned for would come readily years later, when I stopped trying to recreate their experiences and started to write honestly about my own.
Between Jemima and Domino, who are five and eight years my senior respectively, and my mother (mystically nine years my junior, celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday annually), it is safe to say I was raised by the ultimate “cool girls.” Not cool as in chill (they are not). But cool as in beautiful, rebellious, and, when they need to be, icy. Constantly smoking and consummately glamorous, the women in my family were more Ab Fab’s Patsy and Edina than June Cleaver. I couldn’t wait to grow up and be exactly like them. Incidentally, my friends couldn’t either. My sisters’ hand-me-downs were highly coveted by us all. Vivienne Westwood pirate boots. Betsey Johnson hot pants. Shredded vintage T-shirts, complete with holes exactly where your nipples were. Once the goods made their way to me, I’d be drunk with a power I rarely felt otherwise. Endowed with the keys to my sisters’ kingdom, it was no longer just them but also I who could transform a young girl in a racer back Speedo into a harlot in threadbare Eres. But while on the surface I yearned to be like my sisters, deep down, all I wanted was to feel loved by them. In my family, however, between the affairs and addictions, love was often lost. Not gone—just misplaced. We all tore the house apart looking for it.
As I got older, I was able to find a lot of that love through writing what would become my first book, a memoir-in-essays largely about growing up in the fun and dysfunction of our squint-and-it-looks-like-you’re-in-an-expensive-French-brothel West Village brownstone. On the page, I could make sense of the chaos and characters that had so mystified me in life. With the freedom to express myself came the freedom to forgive others and even see my part in things. Perhaps I hadn’t felt my sisters’ affection for me because I hadn’t really let them know me. I seethed with unspoken resentments well into adulthood. (Why had I spent so many of my spring breaks at their rehabs?! How come they still didn’t remember any of my friends’ names?) I was a grown woman replete with the same sense of ineffectiveness I’d felt as a little girl. But was it them relegating me to the old role in the family system? Or had I just been reluctant to grow out of it?
After sharing the manuscript of my finished book with my family last summer, I was filled with a sense of dread. No matter that I’d attached a very intentionally worded email I’d crafted with my therapist, a sage man somewhere in Oregon I’ve never actually met in person but who I understand has a predilection for sweater vests. I knew that my writing could be hurtful to them, even if it had been healing for me. For so long, I’d believed my value was contingent upon my seemingly unique ability to steer our family’s ship towards safe harbor. I was the voice of reason in screaming matches. The champion of the underdog in any fight. Perfect when they were imperfect, or so I thought. Now I was the one rocking the boat.
When my parents first read my book, my worries were affirmed. I would have never done that. What about the good times?! They wrote. You weren’t 11 pounds when you were born! The way I saw my feelings clashed with the way they saw the facts. I yearned to talk to the only other people who knew my parents the way I did—my sisters—though I feared they’d feel similarly. I braced myself as I dialed Jemima.
“It’s your perspective, Lola,” she said emphatically after I explained my situation. “You don’t have to change it just so it matches someone else’s. You’re an author. Not a stenographer.”
“You say that now,” I sobbed. “But you haven’t finished the book yet. Once you have, you might feel differently.”
“Lola,” she replied. “There is nothing you could ever write about me that would change the way I feel.”
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A few weeks went by. Eventually my mother came around, deciding my book wasn’t just good but “the best ever written,” which I think is a bit of stretch but fine, I’ll take what I can get. When I didn’t hear from Domino, I assumed more conflict was on the horizon. Seeing her name finally pop up on my phone a couple days after, I felt a jolt of nervous electricity.
“Hi,” she said.
“I just finished your book."
“And?” I replied anxiously.
“It’s brilliant. Like you.”
Over the course of the next few months, my sisters demonstrated a kind of selflessness and love I had never felt before. Their stance was so consistent I sometimes felt guilty—had I pigeonholed them into the very same childhood roles I myself felt so marooned in? Had I failed to not only see the women, but also the artists that they’d both become? The shifts in our relationships were subtle but seismic. Not long ago, when I’d visit New York from Nashville, where I now live, I’d often avoid my sisters. I wanted to be the more empowered me I was becoming, not the younger, subservient version of myself I’d always felt I had to be around them. On my most recent trip, I didn’t just go see Domino. I ran to her. Five miles across Manhattan Bridge, to catch a rare free hour before she had to pick her kid up from school.
At the end of the summer, I asked Jemima if she’d come to New Orleans, where I’d just finished shooting a film, to help me drive back to Nashville. When she said yes, I couldn’t believe it. My whole life I’d wanted to be cool enough for my big sister to want to do things with me. Now she was in the passenger seat of my pickup. By the time we hit Mississippi, we’d been talking for hours, covering everything from good films to bad friends. When the conversation shifted to a now-funny memory of her bullying me as a child she suddenly grew serious.
“You know, Lola,” she said, “you can be very mean sometimes too.”
I was shocked. I knew I could be mean—in fact I’d even tried to be mean to my sister—I just didn’t think she’d ever noticed. For so long I’d felt her impervious to my desired impact. My face flushed red with shame.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. For a moment, she was quiet.
“It’s okay, baby,” she said, reaching her hand towards mine. She had never called me “baby” before. We hadn’t held hands since she was forced to as a child. It was awkward but I liked it, though I wondered when the discomfort of the gesture would inevitably win out, and one of us would move to itch an arm or muss up our hair.
“Hang on,” she said after a moment, disentangling her fingers from mine. “Hurts a little.”
I began to take my hand away when she grabbed it back, placing my palm evenly on top of hers, our fingertips touching, as if in prayer. We stayed that way for a while.