By: Samantha Borcy
There is a specific quality of encounter that happens when a person reads the private writings of someone they knew in a public way, when the official version of a relationship, with all its conscious management and all its strategic silences, is suddenly supplemented by the version the other person was keeping privately, in the space between what they were willing to say and what they actually thought and felt and endured. Marguerite Duvivier, writing under a pseudonym, had that encounter when her mother Zilda’s secretly kept journals were discovered after her death, and Middle Sisters is the memoir that emerged from reading them. It is a book about six generations of women, and it is also, at its most intimate, a book about what a daughter discovers when her mother’s private record of their shared history is finally made available.
What the journals contain, and what Duvivier traces through the full span of the memoir from Belgium in 1908 to the United States today, is the evidence of women’s resilience operating under conditions that the official record of their era would not have noted or valued: the resilience of Zilda, coerced into a loveless marriage by a dominant mother and spending decades in the company of a self-serving, greedy man while raising her daughters with a complex favoritism that the journals illuminate but do not excuse; the resilience of Marguerite, Zilda’s fiercely independent middle daughter, who marries a brilliant and unfaithful man and navigates that marriage with the specific determination of someone who has watched her own mother’s powerlessness and chosen a different relationship with her own life; and the resilience of the young mother writing now, determined to break the chains of past mistakes for the family she is raising.
The recurring figure of the middle daughter, overlooked in childhood and leaned upon in old age, is the memoir’s most quietly powerful structural insight. Duvivier is herself a middle daughter, reading the journals of her mother who was also a middle daughter, tracing a pattern that repeats across generations with the specific variation of women who each find their own way to survive and occasionally to transcend the conditions that would otherwise define them.
Middle Sisters captures the essence of women’s resilience, showcasing their ability to find humor and strength amidst adversity, and it does so with the unflinching honesty of a pseudonymous memoirist who has chosen to tell the full truth precisely because the pseudonym provides the protection required to tell it. The author’s background as an Associate Professor in Anatomic Pathology gives the narrative an analytical precision that keeps the emotional weight from becoming sentiment, and the love of a daughter for her difficult, complicated, ultimately irreplaceable mother keeps the analytical precision from becoming clinical distance.
If you want a memoir that gives you genuine access to the interior lives of women across six generations, including the private writings they kept hidden from the people who loved them, Middle Sisters by Marguerite Duvivier is the book that makes that access possible with honesty and with grace. Head over to Amazon and get your copy today and let Zilda’s secret journals finally be read.
