Latest news with #MySisterandOtherLovers
Sydney Morning Herald
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘She doesn't want to upset people - I probably do': Bella Freud on sister Esther
Fashion designer Bella Freud, 64, and her novelist sister Esther Freud, 62, are daughters of artist Lucian Freud and great-granddaughters to Sigmund. They were raised by their mother in the UK and Morocco. Esther: Even as a child, Bella had a lot of power. She was bright and capable and often angry, but she had such charisma. She would create situations that felt very daring and exciting. When she was nine, she became a passionate, paid-up member of the World Wildlife Fund. She found an old pram and we went from door to door for donations. I was about seven, and a neighbour reported she'd seen me straining to push this enormous, junk-filled vehicle up the road, with Bella sitting on top. When my mother asked about it, I thought, 'No, no: they don't understand. She allowed me to push her.' That's how powerful she was. Loading Interestingly, I don't think I was ever the subject of her anger. And she also had this enormous capacity for lighting up life; she was incredibly beguiling. Even now, I can say things to her that I can't say to anyone else. I can exaggerate my feelings with her, try things out on her. It's almost like a twin relationship, in that way: this alliance right at the centre of our lives. Sometimes, I think, 'Oh, I'll try not to talk to Bella about this', but I always crack. There just isn't anyone else who can unwrap life for me like her. I have mined my childhood for 35 years [as a fiction writer; her latest novel, My Sister and Other Lovers, is out now.] Some of it is very close to Bella and me, but she's like our father. I once wrote a character clearly based on him, and he said, 'For a horrible moment, I thought he was me, then I remembered, 'Oh no, I don't wear a watch.' ' Bella just says, 'It's fiction', and gives me her blessing. This last book, she said: 'Be sharper, harsher, clearer. Don't worry about hurting my feelings.' It was fabulous. 'I can exaggerate my feelings with Bella, try things out on her. It's almost like a twin relationship, in that way.' Esther Freud Just very recently, she's started her own writing: these beautiful little Sunday stories on Instagram. It's been so illuminating for me. As a child, I was caught between her and my mother – both very strong, fiery, outspoken – always just hoping things would settle down. Now I realise she was unhappy. She had a difficult relationship with our mother; she found the itinerant life we were leading, which actually rather suited me, extremely painful and difficult. It was like clear water, clear air, to finally understand that. And she seems so at peace and happy now; more compassionate for the past, for herself, for our family. I've always been so proud of her. When she first started to design clothes back in the '90s, she'd have these incredible catwalk shows with Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Susie Bick [now Cave]. I've never been brilliant at clothes: I once tried on this lovely, soft, brushed-cotton brown shirt with her and she just said, 'Never, ever buy something unless it really suits you.' I said, 'But it's so comfortable!' and she just looked at me with this look – she lowers her eyes, then raises them – and said, 'Stop it.' Now she gives me things, utterly beautiful things. Some of them I've honestly worn for 25 years.
The Age
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘She doesn't want to upset people - I probably do': Bella Freud on sister Esther
Fashion designer Bella Freud, 64, and her novelist sister Esther Freud, 62, are daughters of artist Lucian Freud and great-granddaughters to Sigmund. They were raised by their mother in the UK and Morocco. Esther: Even as a child, Bella had a lot of power. She was bright and capable and often angry, but she had such charisma. She would create situations that felt very daring and exciting. When she was nine, she became a passionate, paid-up member of the World Wildlife Fund. She found an old pram and we went from door to door for donations. I was about seven, and a neighbour reported she'd seen me straining to push this enormous, junk-filled vehicle up the road, with Bella sitting on top. When my mother asked about it, I thought, 'No, no: they don't understand. She allowed me to push her.' That's how powerful she was. Loading Interestingly, I don't think I was ever the subject of her anger. And she also had this enormous capacity for lighting up life; she was incredibly beguiling. Even now, I can say things to her that I can't say to anyone else. I can exaggerate my feelings with her, try things out on her. It's almost like a twin relationship, in that way: this alliance right at the centre of our lives. Sometimes, I think, 'Oh, I'll try not to talk to Bella about this', but I always crack. There just isn't anyone else who can unwrap life for me like her. I have mined my childhood for 35 years [as a fiction writer; her latest novel, My Sister and Other Lovers, is out now.] Some of it is very close to Bella and me, but she's like our father. I once wrote a character clearly based on him, and he said, 'For a horrible moment, I thought he was me, then I remembered, 'Oh no, I don't wear a watch.' ' Bella just says, 'It's fiction', and gives me her blessing. This last book, she said: 'Be sharper, harsher, clearer. Don't worry about hurting my feelings.' It was fabulous. 'I can exaggerate my feelings with Bella, try things out on her. It's almost like a twin relationship, in that way.' Esther Freud Just very recently, she's started her own writing: these beautiful little Sunday stories on Instagram. It's been so illuminating for me. As a child, I was caught between her and my mother – both very strong, fiery, outspoken – always just hoping things would settle down. Now I realise she was unhappy. She had a difficult relationship with our mother; she found the itinerant life we were leading, which actually rather suited me, extremely painful and difficult. It was like clear water, clear air, to finally understand that. And she seems so at peace and happy now; more compassionate for the past, for herself, for our family. I've always been so proud of her. When she first started to design clothes back in the '90s, she'd have these incredible catwalk shows with Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Susie Bick [now Cave]. I've never been brilliant at clothes: I once tried on this lovely, soft, brushed-cotton brown shirt with her and she just said, 'Never, ever buy something unless it really suits you.' I said, 'But it's so comfortable!' and she just looked at me with this look – she lowers her eyes, then raises them – and said, 'Stop it.' Now she gives me things, utterly beautiful things. Some of them I've honestly worn for 25 years.
Spectator
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Adrift in the world: My Sister and Other Lovers, by Esther Freud, reviewed
Some people spend years squirming on a leather chaise longue before they come to understand, as Philip Larkin so pithily observed: 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad.' Few go on to make peace with the sagacity delivered in his next line: 'They may not mean to, but they do.' In My Sister and Other Lovers, Esther Freud's sequel to her autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky, sisters Lucy and Bea – who spent their early childhood trailing after their hippy mother through 1960s Morocco – slowly edge towards such catharsis. Before that, however, comes a lot more turbulence, and Freud – whose great-grandfather pioneered the couch method – is acutely attentive to its psychological effects. Back in the UK, but still bound to a mother who hitchhikes her way from one disastrous situation to the next, we see the now grown-up sisters attempt, and often fail, to negotiate life on their own terms. Lucy, the narrator, helplessly caught between her fiery older sister and her unreliable parent, chooses men 'in direct relation to how likely they are to leave'. Bea, who is traumatised by childhood abuse, finds escape in heroin. For much of the novel, then, Bea is lost to that darkness, but Freud makes her absence feel like a presence. Delivered in an episodic style reflective of fractured lives, the book skims across time like a stone. When it lands, we're in a new place, with new people and years may have elapsed. Freud writes for the hard-working reader. She refuses to hold our hand. But there's a difference between trusting our intelligence and outright neglect. Writers, as Martin Amis once said, 'must be a good host'. When characters walk on without introduction and past events are mentioned as if we were there (but we weren't), it starts to feel like we've been abandoned at a party in a room full of strangers. Freud's proclivity for experimentation also leads to problems at sentence level. Missing commas, presumably sacrificed in the name of style, abound ('Hearing her name Pearl threw herself between us'); shifting into 'writerly' mode leads to confusing descriptions ('I swallowed so loud the gulp jumped in the car'); and dodgy similes ('The future lifted like a barn') make us feel not, as they should, the joy of recognition, but bewilderment. When style compromises meaning, it ceases to be style; it's just bad writing.
Elle
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
'Sirens' Shows We Just Can't Get Enough Of Toxic Sisterhood
Lately, it feels like every time I turn on the TV, a sister is doing something unthinkable. Gaslighting her sibling. Stealing her boyfriend. Faking her own death to ruin her life. Sisterhood, that age-old shorthand for unconditional love, has gone dark – and we can't stop watching. From the calculating twin gynaecologists in Dead Ringers and the scheming siblings of Bad Sisters to the most recent Netflix and Prime thrillers: The Better Sister and Sirens, mainstream culture is fascinated with the kind of bond that cuts both ways – deep love and deeper resentment in one fraught, inseparable package. Because nothing hurts like family, and sisters have an unmatched capability to twist the knife. FIND OUT MORE ON ELLE COLLECTIVE And it's not just on our screens, our bookshelves are also amuck: Esther Freud's My Sister and Other Lovers, lays bare the complex mesh of fear and mistrust between sisters whilst Favourite Daughter by Morgan Dick has two women working together as therapist and patient – with no idea that they're in fact sisters. I should admit upfront: I'm part of the hysteria. In my new novel Selfish Girls, I write the about an uninhibited, dysfunctional family. It's a pressure-cooker narrative about the pain we inflict on those we love most: our sisters. Writing it, I kept asking myself: what happens when a sibling becomes both your witness and your rival? It's true that toxic sisterhood has always been in the narrative fold. From Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? where sibling rivalry curdles into psychological horror, to Atonement and the O'Haras in Gone with the Wind, fiction loves to recognise the emotional volatility built into sisterhood. Even soap operas from Dynasty to EastEnders have mined the vein of sisterly sabotage for decades. We have ancient archetypes of this uneasy alliance with the Graeae: three sisters who shared a single eye and a single tooth, passing them back and forth in a choreography of dependency and distrust. There's something eerily familiar in this arrangement. It mirrors the way sisters – in fiction and real life – must negotiate shared identity, resources, even attention. The myth captures the essence of what today's tales are digging into: how love and resentment often share the same body. If we're in a golden age of complicated women and problematic sisters are the star, where has the sudden surge in interest come from? What links all these stories is a shared fascination with how female closeness can curdle. We're no longer in the land of heart-warming sisterly support (no offence, Little Women). Instead, we're watching women who grew up in each other's shadows, trying to forge identities outside the sibling dynamic, and often failing spectacularly. This duality is exactly what gives these relationships their cataclysmic charge. Sisters know your history; they know your secrets. They share your DNA and your damage. 'Sisters are our first friends and first enemies,' writes Tessa Hadley. And when things go wrong between sisters, it's never just about what's happening now; it's about decades of unspoken competition and those roles inherited in childhood that are never quite escaped. 'When you look in the mirror, your difficult sibling always looks back, though the image is distorted. In the shadows lurk parts of yourself and your past that you don't want to notice. Behind the reflection, silently influencing the interaction, stand your parents, your grandparents, and all their siblings,' writes the psychotherapist, Jeanne Safer, in her book Cain's Legacy: Liberating Siblings from a Lifetime of Rage, Shame, Secrecy, and Regret. How fascinating then, that the crux of our relationship with our sisters is steeped, not just in our own dynamic, but in the lineage of misgivings from the past. Tensions sharpened across generations. Perhaps that's why the emotional pitch of sisterhood can feel so extreme, so polarised, capable of flipping without warning from love to hate. In fiction, these bonds tilt toxic not because sisterhood is broken, but because it's perceived as unbreakable. Sisters have become the stage on which we can rehearse the ethics of our desire – betrayal, manipulation, cruelty is all made permissible by the assumed resilience of the bond. Only a sister could be trusted to hold our most dangerous fantasies and unimaginable transgressions. It's this unique containment, this charged intimacy, that makes for reckless, potent, unfettered (and ultimately interesting) characters. These stories don't erode the sanctity of sisterhood; they prove its strength. Afterall, we would forgive our sister that which we would not forgive anyone. In fiction – if not also in real life - when she fakes her own death, steals your identity, or frames you for a crime she committed – that's not betrayal. That's just not-so-sisterly love. Selfish Girls by Abigail Bergstrom is out on 10 July. Pre-order here. ELLE Collective is a new community of fashion, beauty and culture lovers. For access to exclusive content, events, inspiring advice from our Editors and industry experts, as well the opportunity to meet designers, thought-leaders and stylists, become a member today HERE.
