Dying Twice: A Sister's Tale
Emma Dally
LittleBrown £16.99, pp211
Buy it at BOL

The main subject of Emma Dally's memoir is the death in 1994 of her younger brother John, who had Aids. He had wanted to kill himself before life became unbearable and made the attempt, having notified family members. Then he survived the overdose, without inflicting further damage on himself. There would be no abridging of death for him - he died twice.

From the family's point of view, death was double in another sense. Emma's depressed older brother Simon had shot himself on Easter Sunday 1989, a death as sudden and unexpected as John's was to be drawn-out and long-anticipated. At the age of 40, Emma Dally had seen only two bodies in her life and both of them were her brothers.

As she points out, the Victorians were much more routinely exposed to the fact of mortality. The Victorians, though, for all their love of mementoes, would have hesitated to keep a piece of a sibling suicide's skull. She mentions this trophy long after the description of Simon's death and it's hard to imagine how she came by it.

As the third child of an original six, and the oldest girl, Emma had eagerly played the role of mother to her little brothers, John and Adam. The role is one which, in her memoir, she half resists and half insists on. Money, for instance, was tighter early on for the Dally parents (both psychiatrists) than it later became. She writes: 'As a teenager, it seemed to me unfair that John and Adam never had to go through the "thrifty" years like the rest of us. I am convinced that this relative affluence at such a young age influenced the way they viewed money and material things when they were adults.'

This may be accurate, but what is revealing is the transition from emotional memory to authoritative statement. The first sentence characterises Emma as much as her brothers, the second takes her out of the equation.

Adam as well as John turned out to be gay and Emma stops short of linking this with their early experience of consumerism. John was dyslexic and academically mediocre in a family of overachievers, so he could be said to offer support to a damage theory of homosexuality, but Adam tended to refute such slanders by being fully in the Dally mould. In any case, John's low self-esteem fell away when he found himself sexually. The brothers founded a courier business which in the medium term did spectacularly well.

As a child of psychiatrists, Emma Dally acknowledges a feeling of guilt that the family had problems of its own, and this compounds the British unease with the memoir of trauma, a form that feels inherently American. There is a feeling of stifled outpouring, with some issues being directly addressed, while other scores are settled obliquely. Her father, in particular, is blamed for emotional absence, not full-throatedly but in an undertone.

The most important person in John's gay life was his partner Jacques, with whom he lived. Jacques declined to contribute to Dying Twice, a refusal for which, perhaps a little presumptuously, she forgives him. Jacques lived the high life with John, and ignored reality when money became a problem. But he was the only person who actually depended on John, so it's hardly surprising that he couldn't bear to let him slip away. He wanted diamorphine to be rationed, for instance, so that the two of them could communicate for as long as possible, while everyone else was eager for his oblivion.

It's not that Emma Dally means to be unsympathetic, or feels that gay people's emotions are less than valuable. But to her the fact that John and Jacques were no longer a sexual couple, and that Jacques had a new lover, made his attachment disproportionate. A note of pettiness creeps in, so that Jacques's farewell kiss to the dying John is editorialised as 'dramatic', his hand-holding 'proprietorial'. The new lover's 'tolerance' and 'saintliness' become virtual code-words for indulgent folly, in a book whose emotions are murkier than its author seems to realise.