As a child, Brittany Ackerman looked up to her brilliant older brother, Skyler. She coveted his Lego buildings and played video games in his bedroom. Later, they both struggled with drug use and suicidal thoughts. In her slim memoir-in-essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, Ackerman tries to make sense of him and her own past.
Ackerman shares simple memories from her youth--babysitters, tantrums, trips to Disney World. There's an underpinning of sadness through each vignette, the anxiety and uncertainty of childhood which, in some ways, never fully goes away. Ackerman wants to be grown before she is, and she skillfully describes the desire to emulate a sibling and the fragility of a happy family. After Skyler gets drunk on a family vacation, she writes, "I don't know if there will ever be calm again. My brother is growing up and I'm not, or maybe I am, maybe finding calm in the storm is what growing up is, and if so I've found it here in the lobby at dawn."
Ackerman writes that her brother remembers these moments differently than she does, and her memoir shows how simultaneously close and far you can be from the people you love. The book doesn't tie up loose ends, and readers may be left wondering about Ackerman and her brother's current lives. Though perhaps there's truth in the lingering questions of these family relationships. Is it possible truly to know one's siblings, or oneself? --Katy Hershberger, freelance writer and bookseller