[Split/Lip Press; 2026]
When Shanda McManus was a girl, she and her little brother were so close that even their names ran together: “ShandaandMonir, ShandaandMonir, ShandaandMonir like a chant.” The two of them were bound together, united in survivorship after their mother’s death from ovarian cancer and their grandmother’s death three years later. Then, just after Shanda finished her first semester of medical school, Monir, not yet twenty-one, was killed in a fatal drive-by shooting. Over thirty years later, McManus began writing intimate, revelatory letters that bridge the past and present and make up the majority of Brother Epistles: A Sister’s Memoir. The book contains an addendum with copies of four handwritten letters and one Army incident report from Monir, so Brother Epistles reads like a conversation that traverses the boundaries of death. “I am finally writing you outside of time,” McManus writes, “to reach that part of myself that is you.” The intimacy between Shanda and Monir is the prevenient fact of the book: it precedes and colors everything else, saturating her writing with tenderness.
The memoir unfolds in spiral: starting with Monir’s death; moving out to show Shanda and Monir as children, their points of connection and divergence; then circling around to show who Shanda has become in the years since Monir’s death and the evolution of the world in which she has continued to develop and change. The book reads like a lyric experiment in time travel. “Grief for me is not a series of five steps,” McManus writes, “but a spiral and a repeating loop. I walk alone outside of time. The past is the present is the future—it is infinite and eternal, like you and me.” Brother Epistles weaves together intergenerational memory and personal anecdote, refusing to relinquish a single minute.
McManus writes to her brother about his family: their father, Monir’s widow, the sons who grew older than he did. She fills him in on what the people he loved have made of their lives in his absence. When Monir died, he and Niecy, his wife, were separated. “Even if you’re still mad with her and act like you don’t care,” McManus writes, “I’m going to tell you that Niecy made something of herself.” McManus is dedicated to chronicling the ways people continued to develop after Monir’s murder. To her, this is the primary tragedy of premature death: that one is robbed of the chance to grow. Over and over again, she laments that his story was cut short, that he didn’t have the opportunity to mature beyond his youthful mistakes. “You got paused before you could change,” she writes. “I wonder what other voices time and status would have given you.”
Because Shanda and Monir grew up together, they partook of a common language filled with shared reference points. McManus skillfully invites the reader into that shared perspective and then expands it to include all that’s happened since Monir’s death in 1992. Monir experienced racism firsthand, both growing up in North Philly and serving in the Army. McManus doesn’t need to tell him about it. But Monir wasn’t around to witness the intensification of anti-Blackness since the 1990s, the backlash against the gains of the Civil Rights movement. “Growing up in the seventies, we hardly knew anybody who went to jail,” McManus writes. “Now . . . it seems like everybody goes.” Through her letters, McManus informs her brother about mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, and three-strike laws: “The so-called War on Drugs seemed like it was a war on us.” She captures what it’s like to have your own government regard you as an enemy. She tells him about Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem, the murder of Philando Castile, and the Black Lives Matter movement. “Not so long ago, the police murdered a black man, George Floyd,” writes McManus. She contextualizes Derek Chauvin’s murder of Floyd as the latest chapter in an old, familiar tale about police violence against men of color: “I know, ain’t nothing new.” As McManus catches her brother up on the sociopolitical state of America since his passing, she simultaneously provides a nuanced education for readers who have had the privilege of remaining ignorant of institutional and interpersonal racism. Monir was murdered while he was selling crack—an act of youthful hubris and desperation he was robbed of the chance to learn from. “You believed that selling crack was the best you could do,” McManus reflects. “And maybe it was. What were your job opportunities? Your choices?” By detailing what’s happened to their mutual family members in the intervening thirty years, McManus shows the systemic nature of the forces that conspire against Black boys. Both of Monir’s sons served time. McManus relays the circumstances to her brother as if giving an accounting for the boys, and her story captures the arbitrariness of police intervention, underwritten by white assumptions of the boys’ criminality. “Jail time was like a slow wave moving towards your sons and it seemed unstoppable.” She writes with total empathy, understanding the reasons Monir made his choices and raging at a country that limits Black boys’ lives to the consequences of their worst decisions.
If you think that a book of letters to a deceased loved one would be dreary or doleful, think again. McManus’s prose, while saturated with grief, is also buoyant and bright. The nature of the correspondence allows McManus to write in present tense, to summon Monir’s presence alongside her own. Her tone is often teasing. “Guess what,” she writes. “There is an oldies station for hip-hop. I know, crazy, they didn’t even play rap music on the radio when it first came out . . . We’re old heads now, look at us with gray hair—well, I’m imagining yours, ok.” McManus grapples with depression, but the way that she names her pain pins it in place, keeps it from expanding and swallowing her whole. She confesses her resistance to treatment and keeps writing. “Depression comes for me now, but it has less power,” she says. “Somehow I recognize it. That doesn’t stop the darkness, but just knowing what’s happening keeps me holding on.” Her commitment to holding on extends from the moment she identified her brother’s body at the hospital. “I touched your chest and I thought I felt your heart. My heart. I backed away from the table and out of the room. I had the sense of facing two doors, one marked DIE and the other LIVE. I had to choose. I stepped, unfeeling, through the second, leaving you behind.” She revels in the life that has occurred since her brother’s death: the lives that have extended past his, and the surprises she’s encountered in her own .
A strong book review makes an argument about the book, but I can’t do that here. Brother Epistles is so intimate—not even because of McManus’s personal revelations, though there are plenty: the abortion she got in high school, her elopement and marriage to a white man she met in medical school, her complicated guilt about living in the suburbs. Rather, the context of the book, written as letters to her dead brother, imbues her prose with so much love that I can respond only with gratitude. I feel that I’ve been invited into a heart-to-heart or granted permission to overhear this conversation.
The book blooms with her reverence for life. “I did live after you died,” McManus writes. “I have had joy and happiness along with desperation and despair.” She catalogues how she got through medical school, met Steve, had a baby, got married, became a doctor. The letters are associative and thematic rather than organized by chronology. McManus’s casual way of referencing relatives by nickname and using shorthand for shared memories keeps the prose informal and organic, drawing the reader into the texture of her life. Her accomplishments are a way that McManus has justified her existence to the world—a world that’s constantly trying to quantify the value of human life—but to her brother, McManus never needed to justify anything. “I stayed alive and became somebody, just like you said I would,” McManus writes. “You meant becoming a doctor. But I was already somebody before—your big sister.”
In publishing her correspondence with her late brother, McManus gives her readers a profound gift. While I read, I felt welcomed into the enduring love between siblings: their solidarity, the secrets they shared with one another, and the way they interpreted the world. “All I know is we are miracles just because we existed,” McManus writes. “And you’re no less of a miracle than me even though you’re gone.” Brother Epistles is a vessel for love that cannot be extinguished by death.
McKenzie Watson-Fore serves as the executive editor for sneaker wave magazine and the inaugural critic-in-residence for MAYDAY. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Offing, Bridge Eight, Christian Century, and elsewhere. She can be found at MWatsonFore.com or drinking tea on her back porch.
This post may contain affiliate links.
