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The Favorite Sister CHAPTER 1
Brett
Would-be yoga instructor number four has punk blond hair and a bodybuilder’s tan. Her name is Maureen and she’s an ex-housewife who has spent the last seven years working on a documentary about the exodus of the Anlo-Ewe tribe from Notsé to the southeastern corner of the Republic of Ghana. If it were up to me, I’d say look no further.
“Thank you for coming all the way up here to see us,” Kelly says with a pleasant smile she doesn’t intend Maureen to ever see again. I know she decided against her the moment she took off her coat to reveal her pink sports bra and mommy gut. Kelly never got mommy gut after she had a baby, and so she believes mommy gut is not a result of biology but a choice. Wrong choice.
I’ve stayed mostly silent during the interview—this is Kelly’s thing—though not in writing—but Maureen turns to me, wringing her hands, shyly.
“At the risk of sounding like a total brownnoser,” she says, “I can’t leave here without saying how lucky this generation of young girls is to have someone like you on their TV screens. Maybe I would have come into my own sooner if I had someone like you to show me how great life can be when you embrace your authentic self. Would have saved my kids a lot of fucking grief.” She slaps a hand over her mouth. “Shit.” Her eyes go wide. “Shit!” Wider still. “Why can’t I stop? I’m so sorry.”
I glance at my twelve-year-old niece sitting in the corner, texting deafly. She wasn’t supposed to be here today, but the babysitter’s dog ate a grape. Toxic, apparently. I turn back to Maureen. “How. Dare. You.”
The silence stretches, uncomfortably. Only when it becomes unbearable do I flash her a grin and repeat, “How fucking dare you.”
“Oh, you’re kidding!” Maureen doubles over with relief, resting her hands on her knees. She releases a breath between her teeth; half whistle, half laugh.
“Easy,” my sister mutters, reminding me of our mother in two terrifying consonants. Our mother could silence a car alarm going off all night with the slow turn of her head.
“Your daughter is stunning, by the way,” Maureen addresses Kelly, changing tack in an attempt to placate my stern-lipped sister, but it is the exact worst thing she could have said about her daughter. Stunning. Striking. Exotic. That face That hair. All of it makes the green tendon in Kelly’s neck throb. My daughter is not some rarefied tropical fruit, she sometimes snaps at well-meaning strangers. She is a twelve-year-old girl. Just call her pretty.
Maureen sees the expression on Kelly’s face and laughs, nervously, turning to appeal to me one last time. “You should know that there’s already a wait list for your book at my local library. Only two people ahead of me, but still. You haven’t even published it yet.”
I offer her the plate of Grindstone artisanal doughnuts. What’s wrong with Dunkin’? I wanted to know. But Kelly had read about designer doughnuts on Grub Street and insisted we stop in Sag Harbor on the way. “You get the bacon maple for that.” I wink at Maureen and she blushes like a much younger woman who married a man despite all those fantasies, starring her best friend.
“Do you get that a lot?” the New York magazine reporter asks when Maureen is gone. Erin, I think she said her name was. “Women who credit their coming out to you?”
“All the time.”
“Why do you think that is?”
I lace my fingers behind my head and kick up my feet. Cocky, straight women often call me with a giggle. “Gay looks good on me, I guess.”
Kelly makes that face our mother warned would stick. I wish she were alive so that I could tell her she was right about something, at least.
“It’s working for you,” Erin agrees, blushing. “Whew!” She fans her cheeks. “Where’s the bathroom in here?”
“Down the hallway on the left,” Kelly tells her.
“No, Brett,” Kelly says, quietly, as soon as the bathroom door shuts. She means Maureen. No, Brett, we aren’t hiring her. No, Brett, it’s not your call. I reach for Erin’s recorder and switch it off so Kelly isn’t caught fat/age/tan shaming on tape.
“Hey,” I hold up my phone to take an Instagram story of our surroundings, “the yoga studio is your baby.” I type NEW SPOKE SPACE COMING JUNE ’17. Click, done. Search for the location. Montauk End of the World doesn’t come up for a while. Service is wonky out here, which reminds me . . . “By the way,” I say to Kelly, “it’s out here.”
Kelly stares at me, blankly.
“You said thank you for coming all the way up here to see us. Montauk isn’t up. It’s east. You want people to think you’re an old pro at the Hamptons scene . . .” I pull my sweatshirt over my head and pet the static out of my famous hair.
This is, in fact, Kelly’s first time out here. A ticket to a comedy show, I realized, after mentioning it to the commercial designer I’ve hired to transform the abandoned hardware store on Montauk’s Main Street into a pop-up yoga studio. A pop-up yoga studio on Montauk’s Main Street. If you’re worried I’ve become more basic than the insult “basic,” you should be.
“Never been to Montauk before?” the designer had repeated back to us in slow disbelief, as if my sister had never seen avocado toast on a menu, or heard Justin Bieber’s music. He spread a palm over his throat, choking on Kelly’s quaintness.
And so earlier, as Kelly and I were setting up the space for the yoga instructor auditions, Kelly told me not to mention anything about it being her first time in Montauk to the New York magazine reporter who was on her way out here to document the first hiring call for the yoga studio.
I tried to parse her reasoning before asking about it. Kelly gets cranky when you ask her to explain things she thinks should be obvious, another fetching facet of her personality she got from our mother. “Why not?” I’d finally been forced to ask. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it would be a bad thing for people to know this was Kelly’s first time in Montauk. I’ve barely been to Montauk, and, if anything, it better serves our “brand”—yup, still the grossest word in the English language—that Kelly has never spent a summer mainlining rosé in a slutty one-piece at Gurney’s. We are the people’s fitness studio.
“Because I don’t want anything that makes us look inexperienced in the press,” she said, flicking open a yoga mat. “I’m worried how it looks to our investors, like we’re little girls playing with Monopoly money.”
Well, I thought but didn’t have the energy to say, they aren’t our investors. They’re my investors. So don’t lose any sleep over it. But I let it slide. I have enough headaches in my life right now. No need to get hung up on the delusional statements of a stay-at-home mom who still hasn’t accepted the fact that her tubby little sister is the overachiever now.
And overachiever I am. Since filming wrapped last season, I’ve raised $23.4 million to expand the location of my spin studio, WeSPOKE. Coming fall 2017, SPOKE will open on the Upper West Side and Soho, and, if this yoga thing does well for us, we have our eye on a space just down the block from our original SPOKE location in the Flatiron, the premier zip code for boutique studio fitness in Manhattan. Not bad for a twenty-seven-year-old community-college dropout who, up until three years ago, was living in her sister’s basement in New Jersey.
I should be proud, and I am, but . . . I don’t know. I can’t help but feel conflicted about the expansion. I loved our scrappy little studio when it was a self-governing affair: There was no board to answer to, no human resources department, no numbingly dull talk of the market. Our seed capital came from an entrepreneurial contest I won when I was twenty-three. I never needed angel investors or bootstrappers, I never had to answer to anyone but myself. The grant money gave me the freedom to focus on the mission of SPOKE, which is and always will be to protect and educate the female Imazighen population of Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains.
Imazighen women and girls—some as young as eight—walk, on average, four miles a day under a gruesome 14 UV Index sun just to bring home a single jerrican of water. It’s a woman’s duty to provide clean water for her family, and the task often prevents them from attending school and entering the workforce later in life. Then there is the issue of their safety. One in five Imazighen women have been sexually assaulted on their way to the well, sometimes by groups of men who hide in the bushes and wait for the youngest walkers. When I heard this, I had to act, and I knew other women would be compelled to as well if I made it easy for them. For every fifth ride at SPOKE, we provide a bike to an Imazighen family in need. The bikes reduce the time of the water-gathering task (from hours to minutes) so that young girls are home in time for school and their moms can go to work. The bikes mobilize girls who haven’t even gotten their periods yet to outpace a gang of rapists.
That was my pitch, and not a single investor bought it. They were all men, and they all thought New York City women were too self-absorbed to care. But these days, it’s cool to care. It’s mandatory to support the sisterhood. Women are spokes in the same wheel, trying their best to move each other forward. That’s SPOKE’s mission statement. Kelly came up with it. Beautiful, huh? Myself, I preferred Get off your privileged ass and think of someone else for a change, but Kelly made the point that we’d probably catch more flies with honey.
Of course, when we didn’t, Kelly lost interest. She laughed at me when I showed her the article I’d clipped from the Out magazine I found in the doctor’s waiting room, detailing the entrepreneurial contest for budding LGBTQ business owners. That’s a long shot, she said, but I’ve always had a strong arm.
I’d peeled apart a folding chair and said, “The Hamptons are absolutely lovely and they should stay that way, but they won’t, not with pop-up yoga studios opening where the hardware store is supposed to be.”
Kelly had sighed. “There’s a client base out here, though.”
I’d set the box of Grindstone doughnuts on the seat of the chair. I’d already eaten two—classic Boston crème and blueberry basil with lemon ricotta frosting. The sugar remained a burning ring in my throat, demanding more. Better than an orgasm, people say about good food, but that isn’t quite right. Food is what happens before the orgasm, the building of something great, the wonderfully excruciating plea to keep going, keep going. Too many women deny themselves this pleasure, and I decided long ago I would not be one of them. Almost one third of young women would trade a year of their lives to have the perfect body. This is not because women are shallow, or because they have their priorities out of whack. It is because society makes life miserable for women who are not thin. I am part of a small but growing minority determined to change that. SPOKE is the first exercise studio that mentions nothing about transforming your body, because study after study proves that your physical body has so little to do with health. Healthy people are people who feel connected to their communities, who are loved and supported by those around them, and who have a sense of purpose in their lives. Healthy women do not waste their precious energy separating egg whites from egg yolks.
“How about this,” I said to Kelly. “I won’t mention anything about this being your first time in Montauk if you consider the free memberships for the locals.”
“No, Brett,” Kelly said, her favorite refrain. “Someone in this family needs to graduate from college.”
“Half a degree from Dartmouth is like a full degree from CUNY,” I pointed out.
“I’ll get a scholarship,” Layla had said, dutifully. Little perfect angel that she is, she had found a broom and was sweeping the area around the yoga mat, because it was dirty and the instructors were going to be auditioning barefooted. When Layla was born, the doctor told me she had 25 percent of my genes, but I think those cells have copied and split a few times since then. It was Layla’s idea to curate an Instagram account and online shop that hawks the wares of Imazighen women. The feed is filled with gorgeous rag rugs, pottery, and cold-pressed olive oil, and 100 percent of the proceeds go back to the women of the High Atlas Mountains. Just like her auntie, Layla thinks with her heart, not her wallet. We have Kelly for that.
“It’s not that easy to get a scholarship, Layla,” Kelly said. “Especially to a top school.”
“Uhhhhh,” I said, making prolonged eye contact with Layla, whose smile was a dare: Say it. “I think she’ll be fine.”
“Don’t do that, Brett,” Kelly muttered, plopping into a chair while her daughter continued to sweep the floors.
I walked over to her and rested my hands on the back of her chair, bringing my face close enough for her to smell the lavender rose poppy seed we could have just gone to Dunkin’ doughnut on my breath. “Pretending to be colorblind is just as offensive as the n-word, you know.”
Kelly covered my whole face with her palm and shoved me away. “Stop.” It came out an exhausted plea. Kelly is a mother, and heretofore exhausted in a way that I as a child-free individual running a multimillion-dollar corporation cannot begin to even contemplate.
Kelly had Layla when she was nineteen years old, in a confounding act of defiance against our recently deceased mother. Growing up, my mother’s shadow darted after Kelly as she moved between AP classes, piano lessons, Habitat for Humanity, SAT tutors, college essay editors, college interview coaches, Dartmouth, premed summer sessions, and finally, a fellowship with the International School of Global Health in North Africa that Kelly returned from motherless, pregnant, and more chill than I’d ever seen her. Our mom was far from the traditional definition of a tiger mom. Her fixed state was mopey, immobilized, one stain on her blouse away from crying. Kelly was the court jester, but instead of juggling and telling jokes, she got straight As and played Bach with soft fingers. When our mother died (took three strokes), Kelly was released from duty. Why she decided to celebrate her freedom by holding out her wrists for another set of handcuffs still escapes me, but then we wouldn’t have Layla, who, listen, I know on a subliminal level has to love my sister more than she loves me. But it doesn’t feel that way. Not to me and not to Kelly either. And it’s a reversal of fortunes for both of us.
Because when I was in high school, I was the least loved. I was smoking pot when I should have been in Spanish class, piercing my nose instead of my ear cartilage, eating white cheddar Cheez-Its for breakfast, and looking more and more like my mother every day, an egregious crime, in her eyes. I never understood it. Kelly may have gotten the thin genes but my mother and I got face. A boy in high school once said that if you put my head on Kelly’s body we could be a supermodel. And this is the problem with the way girls are raised, because both of us were flattered. One of us even gave him a blow job.
Erin returns from the bathroom, shaking her wet hands. “No paper towels in there,” she says. I stick my hands in my sweatshirt and reach out to dry hers. For a moment, our fingers intertwine through the terry cloth material, and we feel that our hands are the same size. I love ...
Revue de presse :
Brett
Would-be yoga instructor number four has punk blond hair and a bodybuilder’s tan. Her name is Maureen and she’s an ex-housewife who has spent the last seven years working on a documentary about the exodus of the Anlo-Ewe tribe from Notsé to the southeastern corner of the Republic of Ghana. If it were up to me, I’d say look no further.
“Thank you for coming all the way up here to see us,” Kelly says with a pleasant smile she doesn’t intend Maureen to ever see again. I know she decided against her the moment she took off her coat to reveal her pink sports bra and mommy gut. Kelly never got mommy gut after she had a baby, and so she believes mommy gut is not a result of biology but a choice. Wrong choice.
I’ve stayed mostly silent during the interview—this is Kelly’s thing—though not in writing—but Maureen turns to me, wringing her hands, shyly.
“At the risk of sounding like a total brownnoser,” she says, “I can’t leave here without saying how lucky this generation of young girls is to have someone like you on their TV screens. Maybe I would have come into my own sooner if I had someone like you to show me how great life can be when you embrace your authentic self. Would have saved my kids a lot of fucking grief.” She slaps a hand over her mouth. “Shit.” Her eyes go wide. “Shit!” Wider still. “Why can’t I stop? I’m so sorry.”
I glance at my twelve-year-old niece sitting in the corner, texting deafly. She wasn’t supposed to be here today, but the babysitter’s dog ate a grape. Toxic, apparently. I turn back to Maureen. “How. Dare. You.”
The silence stretches, uncomfortably. Only when it becomes unbearable do I flash her a grin and repeat, “How fucking dare you.”
“Oh, you’re kidding!” Maureen doubles over with relief, resting her hands on her knees. She releases a breath between her teeth; half whistle, half laugh.
“Easy,” my sister mutters, reminding me of our mother in two terrifying consonants. Our mother could silence a car alarm going off all night with the slow turn of her head.
“Your daughter is stunning, by the way,” Maureen addresses Kelly, changing tack in an attempt to placate my stern-lipped sister, but it is the exact worst thing she could have said about her daughter. Stunning. Striking. Exotic. That face That hair. All of it makes the green tendon in Kelly’s neck throb. My daughter is not some rarefied tropical fruit, she sometimes snaps at well-meaning strangers. She is a twelve-year-old girl. Just call her pretty.
Maureen sees the expression on Kelly’s face and laughs, nervously, turning to appeal to me one last time. “You should know that there’s already a wait list for your book at my local library. Only two people ahead of me, but still. You haven’t even published it yet.”
I offer her the plate of Grindstone artisanal doughnuts. What’s wrong with Dunkin’? I wanted to know. But Kelly had read about designer doughnuts on Grub Street and insisted we stop in Sag Harbor on the way. “You get the bacon maple for that.” I wink at Maureen and she blushes like a much younger woman who married a man despite all those fantasies, starring her best friend.
“Do you get that a lot?” the New York magazine reporter asks when Maureen is gone. Erin, I think she said her name was. “Women who credit their coming out to you?”
“All the time.”
“Why do you think that is?”
I lace my fingers behind my head and kick up my feet. Cocky, straight women often call me with a giggle. “Gay looks good on me, I guess.”
Kelly makes that face our mother warned would stick. I wish she were alive so that I could tell her she was right about something, at least.
“It’s working for you,” Erin agrees, blushing. “Whew!” She fans her cheeks. “Where’s the bathroom in here?”
“Down the hallway on the left,” Kelly tells her.
“No, Brett,” Kelly says, quietly, as soon as the bathroom door shuts. She means Maureen. No, Brett, we aren’t hiring her. No, Brett, it’s not your call. I reach for Erin’s recorder and switch it off so Kelly isn’t caught fat/age/tan shaming on tape.
“Hey,” I hold up my phone to take an Instagram story of our surroundings, “the yoga studio is your baby.” I type NEW SPOKE SPACE COMING JUNE ’17. Click, done. Search for the location. Montauk End of the World doesn’t come up for a while. Service is wonky out here, which reminds me . . . “By the way,” I say to Kelly, “it’s out here.”
Kelly stares at me, blankly.
“You said thank you for coming all the way up here to see us. Montauk isn’t up. It’s east. You want people to think you’re an old pro at the Hamptons scene . . .” I pull my sweatshirt over my head and pet the static out of my famous hair.
This is, in fact, Kelly’s first time out here. A ticket to a comedy show, I realized, after mentioning it to the commercial designer I’ve hired to transform the abandoned hardware store on Montauk’s Main Street into a pop-up yoga studio. A pop-up yoga studio on Montauk’s Main Street. If you’re worried I’ve become more basic than the insult “basic,” you should be.
“Never been to Montauk before?” the designer had repeated back to us in slow disbelief, as if my sister had never seen avocado toast on a menu, or heard Justin Bieber’s music. He spread a palm over his throat, choking on Kelly’s quaintness.
And so earlier, as Kelly and I were setting up the space for the yoga instructor auditions, Kelly told me not to mention anything about it being her first time in Montauk to the New York magazine reporter who was on her way out here to document the first hiring call for the yoga studio.
I tried to parse her reasoning before asking about it. Kelly gets cranky when you ask her to explain things she thinks should be obvious, another fetching facet of her personality she got from our mother. “Why not?” I’d finally been forced to ask. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it would be a bad thing for people to know this was Kelly’s first time in Montauk. I’ve barely been to Montauk, and, if anything, it better serves our “brand”—yup, still the grossest word in the English language—that Kelly has never spent a summer mainlining rosé in a slutty one-piece at Gurney’s. We are the people’s fitness studio.
“Because I don’t want anything that makes us look inexperienced in the press,” she said, flicking open a yoga mat. “I’m worried how it looks to our investors, like we’re little girls playing with Monopoly money.”
Well, I thought but didn’t have the energy to say, they aren’t our investors. They’re my investors. So don’t lose any sleep over it. But I let it slide. I have enough headaches in my life right now. No need to get hung up on the delusional statements of a stay-at-home mom who still hasn’t accepted the fact that her tubby little sister is the overachiever now.
And overachiever I am. Since filming wrapped last season, I’ve raised $23.4 million to expand the location of my spin studio, WeSPOKE. Coming fall 2017, SPOKE will open on the Upper West Side and Soho, and, if this yoga thing does well for us, we have our eye on a space just down the block from our original SPOKE location in the Flatiron, the premier zip code for boutique studio fitness in Manhattan. Not bad for a twenty-seven-year-old community-college dropout who, up until three years ago, was living in her sister’s basement in New Jersey.
I should be proud, and I am, but . . . I don’t know. I can’t help but feel conflicted about the expansion. I loved our scrappy little studio when it was a self-governing affair: There was no board to answer to, no human resources department, no numbingly dull talk of the market. Our seed capital came from an entrepreneurial contest I won when I was twenty-three. I never needed angel investors or bootstrappers, I never had to answer to anyone but myself. The grant money gave me the freedom to focus on the mission of SPOKE, which is and always will be to protect and educate the female Imazighen population of Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains.
Imazighen women and girls—some as young as eight—walk, on average, four miles a day under a gruesome 14 UV Index sun just to bring home a single jerrican of water. It’s a woman’s duty to provide clean water for her family, and the task often prevents them from attending school and entering the workforce later in life. Then there is the issue of their safety. One in five Imazighen women have been sexually assaulted on their way to the well, sometimes by groups of men who hide in the bushes and wait for the youngest walkers. When I heard this, I had to act, and I knew other women would be compelled to as well if I made it easy for them. For every fifth ride at SPOKE, we provide a bike to an Imazighen family in need. The bikes reduce the time of the water-gathering task (from hours to minutes) so that young girls are home in time for school and their moms can go to work. The bikes mobilize girls who haven’t even gotten their periods yet to outpace a gang of rapists.
That was my pitch, and not a single investor bought it. They were all men, and they all thought New York City women were too self-absorbed to care. But these days, it’s cool to care. It’s mandatory to support the sisterhood. Women are spokes in the same wheel, trying their best to move each other forward. That’s SPOKE’s mission statement. Kelly came up with it. Beautiful, huh? Myself, I preferred Get off your privileged ass and think of someone else for a change, but Kelly made the point that we’d probably catch more flies with honey.
Of course, when we didn’t, Kelly lost interest. She laughed at me when I showed her the article I’d clipped from the Out magazine I found in the doctor’s waiting room, detailing the entrepreneurial contest for budding LGBTQ business owners. That’s a long shot, she said, but I’ve always had a strong arm.
I’d peeled apart a folding chair and said, “The Hamptons are absolutely lovely and they should stay that way, but they won’t, not with pop-up yoga studios opening where the hardware store is supposed to be.”
Kelly had sighed. “There’s a client base out here, though.”
I’d set the box of Grindstone doughnuts on the seat of the chair. I’d already eaten two—classic Boston crème and blueberry basil with lemon ricotta frosting. The sugar remained a burning ring in my throat, demanding more. Better than an orgasm, people say about good food, but that isn’t quite right. Food is what happens before the orgasm, the building of something great, the wonderfully excruciating plea to keep going, keep going. Too many women deny themselves this pleasure, and I decided long ago I would not be one of them. Almost one third of young women would trade a year of their lives to have the perfect body. This is not because women are shallow, or because they have their priorities out of whack. It is because society makes life miserable for women who are not thin. I am part of a small but growing minority determined to change that. SPOKE is the first exercise studio that mentions nothing about transforming your body, because study after study proves that your physical body has so little to do with health. Healthy people are people who feel connected to their communities, who are loved and supported by those around them, and who have a sense of purpose in their lives. Healthy women do not waste their precious energy separating egg whites from egg yolks.
“How about this,” I said to Kelly. “I won’t mention anything about this being your first time in Montauk if you consider the free memberships for the locals.”
“No, Brett,” Kelly said, her favorite refrain. “Someone in this family needs to graduate from college.”
“Half a degree from Dartmouth is like a full degree from CUNY,” I pointed out.
“I’ll get a scholarship,” Layla had said, dutifully. Little perfect angel that she is, she had found a broom and was sweeping the area around the yoga mat, because it was dirty and the instructors were going to be auditioning barefooted. When Layla was born, the doctor told me she had 25 percent of my genes, but I think those cells have copied and split a few times since then. It was Layla’s idea to curate an Instagram account and online shop that hawks the wares of Imazighen women. The feed is filled with gorgeous rag rugs, pottery, and cold-pressed olive oil, and 100 percent of the proceeds go back to the women of the High Atlas Mountains. Just like her auntie, Layla thinks with her heart, not her wallet. We have Kelly for that.
“It’s not that easy to get a scholarship, Layla,” Kelly said. “Especially to a top school.”
“Uhhhhh,” I said, making prolonged eye contact with Layla, whose smile was a dare: Say it. “I think she’ll be fine.”
“Don’t do that, Brett,” Kelly muttered, plopping into a chair while her daughter continued to sweep the floors.
I walked over to her and rested my hands on the back of her chair, bringing my face close enough for her to smell the lavender rose poppy seed we could have just gone to Dunkin’ doughnut on my breath. “Pretending to be colorblind is just as offensive as the n-word, you know.”
Kelly covered my whole face with her palm and shoved me away. “Stop.” It came out an exhausted plea. Kelly is a mother, and heretofore exhausted in a way that I as a child-free individual running a multimillion-dollar corporation cannot begin to even contemplate.
Kelly had Layla when she was nineteen years old, in a confounding act of defiance against our recently deceased mother. Growing up, my mother’s shadow darted after Kelly as she moved between AP classes, piano lessons, Habitat for Humanity, SAT tutors, college essay editors, college interview coaches, Dartmouth, premed summer sessions, and finally, a fellowship with the International School of Global Health in North Africa that Kelly returned from motherless, pregnant, and more chill than I’d ever seen her. Our mom was far from the traditional definition of a tiger mom. Her fixed state was mopey, immobilized, one stain on her blouse away from crying. Kelly was the court jester, but instead of juggling and telling jokes, she got straight As and played Bach with soft fingers. When our mother died (took three strokes), Kelly was released from duty. Why she decided to celebrate her freedom by holding out her wrists for another set of handcuffs still escapes me, but then we wouldn’t have Layla, who, listen, I know on a subliminal level has to love my sister more than she loves me. But it doesn’t feel that way. Not to me and not to Kelly either. And it’s a reversal of fortunes for both of us.
Because when I was in high school, I was the least loved. I was smoking pot when I should have been in Spanish class, piercing my nose instead of my ear cartilage, eating white cheddar Cheez-Its for breakfast, and looking more and more like my mother every day, an egregious crime, in her eyes. I never understood it. Kelly may have gotten the thin genes but my mother and I got face. A boy in high school once said that if you put my head on Kelly’s body we could be a supermodel. And this is the problem with the way girls are raised, because both of us were flattered. One of us even gave him a blow job.
Erin returns from the bathroom, shaking her wet hands. “No paper towels in there,” she says. I stick my hands in my sweatshirt and reach out to dry hers. For a moment, our fingers intertwine through the terry cloth material, and we feel that our hands are the same size. I love ...
PRAISE FOR THE FAVORITE SISTER BY JESSICA KNOLL
"What could be more engrossing, guilty-pleasure-wise, than a reality show about rich, backstabbing women? A juicy whodunit staged behind the scenes of just such a fictional show, that's what. In Knoll's follow-up to 2015's Luckiest Girl Alive, one of the viciously ambitious stars of the series Goal Diggers ends up dead—and the truth behind the murder isn't revealed until each conniving cast member presents her version of the backstory. Deliciously savage and wildly entertaining."—People Magazine (Book of the Week)
“Knoll mines the rich landscape of reality television and creates a binge-worthy beach read complete with the provocative twists and turns of a whodunit...Reality TV fans will get a kick out of seeing their favorite Real Housewives amalgamated into fictional form. Hint: We see a lot of RHONY in these ladies.”—USA Today (3 out of 4 stars)
“Knoll explores the blurry line between a reality show and real life--and the duplicity of family ties and friendship—in this razor-sharp, darkly comic thriller...[a] briskly paced whodunit...Though the mystery is engrossing enough in its own right, Knoll's novel is most notable as a potent takedown of a reality-show-obsessed culture that seeks out the spotlight rather than harder truths.“—Publishers Weekly (STARRED REVIEW)
“Fans of Jessica Knoll's Luckiest Girl Alive, buckle up. In The Favorite Sister, Knoll takes us through the crazy world of reality TV, filled with careful observations and complete OMG moments, like no author can. The story of five women on a reality show called The Goal Diggers, it is utterly unputdownable. Read it, then have fun with your friends trying to figure out which real-life reality stars inspired each of the fictional ones here.“—PopSugar
“You'll be seeing this pink umbrella on beaches everywhere this summer. The next thriller from the pen of Luckiest Girl Alive has a reality TV show as its setting, and a pair of sisters—who are definitely no Housewives—with a dark secret to get the action going.“—Elle
“A twisty, sexy thriller, jam-packed with wit and snark. Everything you wanted to know about what goes on off-camera is here: the secrets, the lies, and all the juicy details that make you speed through it like an episode of The Bachelor.“—Glamour
“The Real Housewives are tame next to the reality-show stars in Jessica Knoll’s wickedly gripping The Favorite Sister.“—Cosmopolitan
“Picture a fictional feminist reality TV show that's basically The Real Housewives of Startup Boardrooms. We find out early that one of the five castmates is dead, but we have no idea who did it, or why. This is the kind of soapy, hilariously vicious book you'll gobble up in one sitting.“—Marie Claire
“We don't want to give too much away, but you won't be able to put this one down—no matter how good the water looks."—Good Housekeeping
“Knoll explores the pressure society places on women to be everything to everyone and do it all without a strand of hair out of place. There's enough conniving, scandal, and snark to rival the most shocking episodes of Real Housewives, and these cutthroat divas play to win even if it means blurring the line between truth and lies. In the end, murder seems inevitable. Season 4 will end with a bang, and there will be blood...salaciously entertaining.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Knoll's second thriller (after Luckiest Girl Alive) combines the cut-throat world of reality television and the competition for fame among alleged friends. The unexpected and unpredictable twists and surprising revelations will delight suspense fans.”—Library Journal
“Knife-sharp and enthralling, Jessica Knoll’s The Favorite Sister is as bold and smart and audacious a novel about women and ambition as you could hope for. A more-than-worthy follow-up to Luckiest Girl Alive, it proves Knoll is a literary force to be reckoned with.”—Megan Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of You Will Know Me
***
PRAISE FOR LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE BY JESSICA KNOLL
[A] huge summer read . . . one of those great stories that you can’t put down!”—Reese Witherspoon, InStyle
“The perfect page-turner to start your summer.”—People (Book of the Week)
“Dark, twisty . . . razor-sharp writing . . . propulsive prose . . . [The] reveal is a real doozy—a legitimately shocking, completely unputdownable sequence that unfolds like a slow-motion horror film. It instantly elevates Luckiest Girl . . . and that momentum keeps going until its final pages.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Loved Gone Girl? We promise [Luckiest Girl Alive is] just as addictive.”—Good Housekeeping
“A pulse-pounding, jaw-dropping novel about how tragedy twists and shapes lives.”—InTouch (A-)
“When Ani FaNelli wants something, she gets it: the job, the body, the man. What starts as a Mean Girls-seeming story line transforms into something so dark, so plot-twistingly intense that...well, actually, no spoilers here.” —Marie Claire
“A knockout debut novel . . . completely enthralling . . . devilishly dark and fun.”—Publishers Weekly
“[Ani FaNelli is] a cross between Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw and Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne. . . . Knoll’s debut truly delivers and will keep readers engaged until the end.”—Library Journal
“This is going to be the book you insist all your friends read this summer. . . . [A] clever, cunning satire on the female condition in the 21st century.”—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
"What could be more engrossing, guilty-pleasure-wise, than a reality show about rich, backstabbing women? A juicy whodunit staged behind the scenes of just such a fictional show, that's what. In Knoll's follow-up to 2015's Luckiest Girl Alive, one of the viciously ambitious stars of the series Goal Diggers ends up dead—and the truth behind the murder isn't revealed until each conniving cast member presents her version of the backstory. Deliciously savage and wildly entertaining."—People Magazine (Book of the Week)
“Knoll mines the rich landscape of reality television and creates a binge-worthy beach read complete with the provocative twists and turns of a whodunit...Reality TV fans will get a kick out of seeing their favorite Real Housewives amalgamated into fictional form. Hint: We see a lot of RHONY in these ladies.”—USA Today (3 out of 4 stars)
“Knoll explores the blurry line between a reality show and real life--and the duplicity of family ties and friendship—in this razor-sharp, darkly comic thriller...[a] briskly paced whodunit...Though the mystery is engrossing enough in its own right, Knoll's novel is most notable as a potent takedown of a reality-show-obsessed culture that seeks out the spotlight rather than harder truths.“—Publishers Weekly (STARRED REVIEW)
“Fans of Jessica Knoll's Luckiest Girl Alive, buckle up. In The Favorite Sister, Knoll takes us through the crazy world of reality TV, filled with careful observations and complete OMG moments, like no author can. The story of five women on a reality show called The Goal Diggers, it is utterly unputdownable. Read it, then have fun with your friends trying to figure out which real-life reality stars inspired each of the fictional ones here.“—PopSugar
“You'll be seeing this pink umbrella on beaches everywhere this summer. The next thriller from the pen of Luckiest Girl Alive has a reality TV show as its setting, and a pair of sisters—who are definitely no Housewives—with a dark secret to get the action going.“—Elle
“A twisty, sexy thriller, jam-packed with wit and snark. Everything you wanted to know about what goes on off-camera is here: the secrets, the lies, and all the juicy details that make you speed through it like an episode of The Bachelor.“—Glamour
“The Real Housewives are tame next to the reality-show stars in Jessica Knoll’s wickedly gripping The Favorite Sister.“—Cosmopolitan
“Picture a fictional feminist reality TV show that's basically The Real Housewives of Startup Boardrooms. We find out early that one of the five castmates is dead, but we have no idea who did it, or why. This is the kind of soapy, hilariously vicious book you'll gobble up in one sitting.“—Marie Claire
“We don't want to give too much away, but you won't be able to put this one down—no matter how good the water looks."—Good Housekeeping
“Knoll explores the pressure society places on women to be everything to everyone and do it all without a strand of hair out of place. There's enough conniving, scandal, and snark to rival the most shocking episodes of Real Housewives, and these cutthroat divas play to win even if it means blurring the line between truth and lies. In the end, murder seems inevitable. Season 4 will end with a bang, and there will be blood...salaciously entertaining.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Knoll's second thriller (after Luckiest Girl Alive) combines the cut-throat world of reality television and the competition for fame among alleged friends. The unexpected and unpredictable twists and surprising revelations will delight suspense fans.”—Library Journal
“Knife-sharp and enthralling, Jessica Knoll’s The Favorite Sister is as bold and smart and audacious a novel about women and ambition as you could hope for. A more-than-worthy follow-up to Luckiest Girl Alive, it proves Knoll is a literary force to be reckoned with.”—Megan Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of You Will Know Me
***
PRAISE FOR LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE BY JESSICA KNOLL
[A] huge summer read . . . one of those great stories that you can’t put down!”—Reese Witherspoon, InStyle
“The perfect page-turner to start your summer.”—People (Book of the Week)
“Dark, twisty . . . razor-sharp writing . . . propulsive prose . . . [The] reveal is a real doozy—a legitimately shocking, completely unputdownable sequence that unfolds like a slow-motion horror film. It instantly elevates Luckiest Girl . . . and that momentum keeps going until its final pages.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Loved Gone Girl? We promise [Luckiest Girl Alive is] just as addictive.”—Good Housekeeping
“A pulse-pounding, jaw-dropping novel about how tragedy twists and shapes lives.”—InTouch (A-)
“When Ani FaNelli wants something, she gets it: the job, the body, the man. What starts as a Mean Girls-seeming story line transforms into something so dark, so plot-twistingly intense that...well, actually, no spoilers here.” —Marie Claire
“A knockout debut novel . . . completely enthralling . . . devilishly dark and fun.”—Publishers Weekly
“[Ani FaNelli is] a cross between Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw and Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne. . . . Knoll’s debut truly delivers and will keep readers engaged until the end.”—Library Journal
“This is going to be the book you insist all your friends read this summer. . . . [A] clever, cunning satire on the female condition in the 21st century.”—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
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- ÉditeurSimon & Schuster
- Date d'édition2018
- ISBN 10 1501153196
- ISBN 13 9781501153198
- ReliureRelié
- Nombre de pages384
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