REVIEW: Brother Epistles: A Sister’s Memoir by Shanda McManus

Reviewed by Kirtan Nautiyal

In her debut memoir Brother Epistles: A Sister’s Memoir (Split/Lip Press; June 2026), Dr. Shanda McManus reflects on a life without her younger brother Monir, who was murdered in a drive-by shooting in 1992. It’s a luxury she didn’t afford herself at the time. Still close to a childhood in North Philadelphia marked by poverty and racism, she felt she had to be strong, not only for the rest of her family, but for herself, then grinding through the first grueling years of medical school. “Being strong meant no tears,” she notes, “but inside I churned and simmered like molten rock.”

The book is her attempt to work through that unresolved grief. Structured as a series of letters to her brother, the letters are outside of time — in them, Monir is addressed in the present tense. “I think time may be a loop,” McManus speculates in one of her first missives, “because I keep looping back to you.” The immediacy of this conversational structure invites us into these letters, allowing a level of intimacy that’s compelling, helping us more deeply understand the recursive nature of grief.

Further drawing us in is McManus’s use of what she calls her original voice or O.V. “You know — that voice, little brother, you could pick out in a room filled with other voices. Not just the North Philly girl voice from the ‘90s; my voice, the rhythm and the cadence and the things I talk about. You (just you) could pick out the laughter and ease underneath — get the full meaning of everything I’m trying to say.” There is no pretension here, and readers will also find the full meaning of McManus’s work more accessible as a result.

The letters soon move beyond childhood memories and the immediate tragedy of Monir’s death. Communicating with her brother, McManus gives an accounting of her life in the thirty years after his murder. There are the difficult years of medical training at a school with only five Black students in a student body of over two hundred. Then the crucible of her unexpected relationship with Steve, her medical school classmate. Their biracial marriage, which initially alienates both of their families, eventually turns into a source of great strength.

It’s a strength that McManus needs to navigate an American society still riven by racism. In a bitter irony, she tells Monir about the ongoing epidemic of violence against Black men, the very act of sharing these stories serving as an important reminder of the humanity behind the dispiriting statistics.  She tells him also about the challenges of raising mixed race children in an affluent, largely White community so different from where they grew up. And when her son is the victim of a racial epithet at a summer camp, McManus helps us viscerally understand the pressures to keep pretending everything is OK, to avoid being thought of as just another “angry Black woman.”

The book’s development of this recurring theme — of fighting to escape the infinitesimally small range of emotional affect allowed to Black women in our society — becomes its most resonant strength. And, as the book comes to its conclusion, McManus’s writing makes clearer that expressions of joy are as important a part of this struggle as expressions of grief.

Sharing in the elation of the Eagles’ Super Bowl win, enjoying Marvel’s The Black Panther, or finding catharsis in a rapper’s rhymes — it’s simple pleasures like that make this life worth living. In McManus’ vulnerable and raw debut work, we see how the continuing capacity for joy — even in the face of unthinkable hardship — remains the most enduring testament to the resilience of the human spirit.