A Sister’s Epistolary

SHANDA MCMANUS HAD just finished her first semester of medical school when she found out her little brother, Monir Hall, had been struck down in a drive-by shooting. As she was becoming a doctor, Hall—an army veteran and father of two, just shy of his 21st birthday—was selling crack in their Philadelphia neighborhood. In a cold hospital room where Hall lay brain-dead, McManus pressed her hand to her brother’s chest and thought she felt faint beats of his heart. In her debut memoir Brother Epistles, McManus recounts the night when she walked out of that room. She “had the sense of facing two doors, one marked DIE and the other LIVE.” She “stepped, unfeeling, through the second.”