Highlands Ranch author Eleanor Brown has a New York Times best seller in her debut novel, “The Three Sisters.” It’s a work that looks into complex family relationships, particularly those among three adult sisters, and ponders the roles and the responsibilities that are part of adulthood.
Their mother’s breast cancer is the cause that brings the three sisters — Rose (Rosalind), Bean (Bianca) and Cordy (Cordelia) Andreas — together at their childhood home in Barnwell, Ohio. The fictional town is built around its university, where their father is a respected Shakespearean scholar. His passion for Shakespeare isn’t limited to his daughters’ names. Raised in a home where books abound and television is something other people watched, the family has a habit of quoting the Bard at every opportunity, particularly when emotions run high.
During an interview in a local bookstore, Brown said that the sisters’ dynamic grew in part from her own experiences (she is the youngest of three daughters), as well as from her fascination with the effects of birth order. While she finds all the ways families interact fascinating, she was “particularly interested in birth order and the way that those roles relate to each other.”
“Stereotypically,” she said, “the oldest is very driven and successful; the middle is the mediator and very social, but also very lost. The youngest is the performer, but also spoiled and often manipulative.”
These roles are a jumping off point in the creation of the characters. Rose, the oldest, is ambitious and controlling; she’s never left Barnwell and shoulders the work of caring for aging parents, a fact she never tires of reminding her siblings. Though she is successful in that she’s earned a doctorate in mathematics, her adjunct professor position does not take her close to a tenure track, and she’s not realized her dream, teaching at Barnwell.
Bean, in the middle, is more flamethrower than mediator. She returns home ostensibly to help with their mother’s care, hiding the fact that embezzlement cost her a job in New York. Cordy is unaccustomed to responsibility. She returns home, pregnant, after years of drifting.
Brown observed the dynamics of sibling roles, in her family and in others. “Even though I watched people grow out of those roles, when you get together, you slip right back into them,” she said. “That dynamic seems cast in stone. How do we break out of that?”
The novel is buoyed by the use of Shakespearean quotes, though it is that rare work that isn’t modeled on one of his plots but, rather, picks and chooses passages to fit a particular scene. Brown said that her research was exhaustive, and at the start, she “reread the plays, watched movies and went to productions.”
The research is applied to illustrate a family dynamic.
“Every family has their own language and their own way of communication,” she said. “I chose a family whose communication is so stunted that they communicate in someone else’s words. When things get really emotionally tough, they fall back on that, instead of learning to speak for themselves.”
Though Shakespearean scholarship is integral to the family, “Any original thoughts about Shakespeare are long gone. The way they use his speech is totally divested of meaning and taken completely out of context.”
“The Weird Sisters” floats unanchored in time; it is devoid of references to technology. Brown said part of this was a commercial decision. “I didn’t want the book to have an expiration date.” More important is the way that the lack of technology defines her characters.
“This is a family that lives in their own world,” she said. They all live “in this sort of magical world they’ve created. It was definitely purposeful.”
This lack of a technological anchor resulted in challenges. Rose ends up in a long-distance relationship with her fiance, one that is anachronistically conducted through letters. The mother’s cancer treatments are anchored in the early ’90s and not representative of current technology.
Ultimately, Brown said her novel has a single major theme. It is, she said, about what it means to be an adult. “When you are young and you look at grown-ups, they look like a different species.
“I was curious about what made you an adult. Is it a certain state of mind or a set of responsibilities? All three of the sisters have strong ideas about what it means to be responsible, and they’re all wrong. The situations they are in — parenthood, career, taking care of older parents — are all markers of adulthood. But (even) I keep waiting for the day when I’ll wake up and say, ‘Today I’m an adult. Today I’m a grown-up.’ That day never came.”
Readers don’t see that day arrive for the sisters, but they can imagine it in their future.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer living in Centennial.
