We think of letters as a two-way form of communication: They go to and fro in the world, from one writer to the reader, who becomes the writer of the next letter. But sometimes we write letters that are not returned in a traditional way. In Brother Epistles: A Sister’s Memoir, Shanda McManus does just this, constructing a memoir composed of letters to her deceased brother.
These letters serve more for the writer than for the recipient, a young Black man who has passed away when they were written. They are a way of creating narrative for the living to make sense of life’s chaos and tragedy. And while we do not find all the answers in this heart-rending book, we do find much incisive, poignant reflection that opens us up to deep empathy and kinship with the author’s grief and growth.
McManus was the memory-keeper for her brother Monir when they were alive; now she is also his memory-keeper in death. Telling his story both creates one for herself and shares her revelations with others, so that they might understand how the grief and racism that has coursed through her life might echo in theirs. In this way, it is a correspondence, an unconventional form of call and response in which the reader’s reflection is the call back, and the letters speak to one another of guilt, responsibility, identity, relationships, faith and so much more.
The author’s path diverged from that of her brother; by the time he had returned from the military, including a tour in Iraq, and was selling drugs, she was in medical school, on her way to securing a permanent way out of the poverty that surrounded them in childhood.
Nothing could have prepared her for his murder at the age of 20 in a drive-by shooting that is still unsolved (though she is convinced someone on the street knows who did it). While the police never asked her about it, the detective called her father for years every Christmas telling him not to give up hope—if only because the killer would likely be jailed for something else. This form of justice does not comfort her, however, because it won’t bring Monir back.
Monir turned to drug dealing to feed his family after serving in the army, and McManus was conscious that some might blame him for his own murder. To avoid this, she spread a story that protected him, saying perhaps it was a case of mistaken identity. What’s interesting is that she wants to protect Monir from being blamed for his murder, but at the same time she also blames herself for letting him down. Neither is the responsible party for the murder, nor could either control how his life would unfold.
As a child, Monir was bitten by a dog that appeared friendly. McManus introduces this story to remind us that “what we assume is safe can rip us open and leave us wounded or worse.” And for Monir, staying in the neighborhood he grew up in is what ripped him apart.
McManus asks her brother, “How could we have not seen the future?” Yet she did. A year before he was shot, she dreamed it in vivid detail, a scene that opens the book. This is not a memoir of surprises, but a memoir of discoveries and revelations. “Dreams make me believe we are more than what we can see and touch. In sleep, I experience another reality. I hope you’re a believer because now we only meet in dreams,” she writes, invoking the biblical history of dreams as prophecies and messages from God.
As much as this book memorializes Monir, it is McManus’s story, too, of survival and recovery. Neither happens in a straight line, but through a series of ups and downs, transitions and new experiences. She has just finished her exams in her first semester of medical school when she gets the call that her little brother has been shot.
When he dies, she sees everything “through a film of gray.” And yet her decision to stick with God is pivotal. “I had to decide if I was going to have faith in hope. I had to choose to keep believing in God. God who could be good even with the unexplainable, unreasonable and unfair.” McManus describes her choice to believe she will see her brother again in heaven as the only option besides a bottomless hole of grief. Her faith emerges as constant throughout the narrative, and the act of writing letters is also an act of faith.
Drawing on her deep hope of seeing Monir again, she reveals to him a secret kept all this time: She invites her brother to look up her unborn child in heaven, whom she finally names in a letter to him 30 years after her abortion. As a teenager, she did not tell him about this, afraid of what he would do to the father.
Later, she elopes with a white man, something she imagines her brother would not predict. “Some things are unbelievable until they happen,” she explains to him. She now lives in a world that is a far cry from their Philadelphia upbringing. People ask if her light-skinned baby is hers when they go out alone. In suburban New Jersey, 20 people in her town of 5,000 are Black, and her husband tells service people in advance that his wife is Black so she has authority to speak with them. Answering a call on a plane for an emergency doctor, she is asked for identification to prove who she is.
It’s a world her brother never experienced, but she wonders what his time in the military was like, especially given what he once told her: “If you ain’t white, the army ain’t right.” We get a tiny glimpse into his army days from an addendum of his letters to her in which their affection and closeness shine.
McManus directly addresses racism’s link to her brother’s murder in one letter, writing: “If you had been white, the chance of you being shot down on the street where you lived would have been small. You’d be alive. Being black whittled down your life expectancy in America. You had a few narrow paths for staying alive, but many wide ways to die.” She poses the question of how to love America as a Black person, given that in school the only times she saw Black people in the curriculum were in lessons on slavery and civil rights.
This legacy is part of the American legacy, even in times when the history of the Black experience in the nation is being erased from national parks. The letters invite both author and reader to reflect on racism and poverty. These forces may have affected us differently. But we cannot deny our identities have been impacted by our relationship to them.
Yet perhaps it is the interpersonal relationships we have that are the most powerful of all, hued as they are by systematic injustices. A legacy of grief haunts McManus through her career as she experiences success and builds a family of her own. But as McManus tells Monir, “I stayed alive and became somebody, just like you said I would. You meant becoming a doctor. But I was already somebody before—your big sister.”
This article appears in October 2026.
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