Novelist Rebecca Watson: ‘What are siblings: twisted reflections of ourselves? Allies? Enemies?’

This summer, when I was signing books after an event, I met a therapist who had bought my novel and who was planning to suggest it to her client, too. I Will Crash depicts a difficult sibling relationship and it was a reading experience she thought her client would find helpful. “We’re still behind in how we talk about siblings,” she said. “The taboo is strong. We’ve got parents down,” she continued, “but for siblings, it’s still early.”

Her comment was gratifying – what she expressed was partly why I had wanted to write a sibling relationship in the first place. With a relationship between a parent and a child, there are well-known dynamics at play: a power imbalance, a duty of care, expectations. Larkin’s “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” has been repeated and passed on – a great line turned cliche, diminished by repeated acknowledgment like a stone eroded on a beach. A parent-child relationship remains complicated but our scaffolding for how to talk about it in adulthood is stronger. With siblings, the terrain becomes unreliable. What are they: twisted reflections of ourselves? Allies? Enemies? What are we allowed to expect of them?

By some curious shake of the snow globe, a host of recent novels have, like mine, taken the subject on. In May came The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes and Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors, both about a group of sisters distanced from each other; there was also further focus on Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About – a novel about a woman mourning the death of her twin brother – thanks to the International Booker prize. Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, published in June, was told from the perspectives of three bristling sisters. And now we have Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, about a fraught relationship between two brothers.

Intermezzo alternates between Ivan and Peter, brothers whose relationship is laced with misinterpretations. During the novel, they become temporarily estranged; Ivan forcing the hand of his frustration. The tension is exacerbated by a crisis – their father has recently died. Crises strike all these novels. The sibling relationship is by default ongoing so it’s not surprising that writers use events to initiate change and tension-point. Some, like Armfield, Hughes, Mellors and Rooney, switch between sibling perspectives to study conflicting interpretations. In Posthuma’s novel and my own, the pain is in the impossibility of seeing the other side.

Though these novels are remarkably different from one another, essential truths recur: how siblings can see each other in straitjacketed roles, set prematurely into an understanding of the other; how inextricable the relationship can be even if unpleasant. Friends can pass out of lives slowly, gently, until their significance is permitted to fade. Romantic relationships can be ended and eventually accepted as having not been right. But relationships we do not choose – that we are born with or pick up soon afterwards – we can feel tied to. In positive sibling relationships, that’s the joy: one, two, three, more people who will always be connected to you and care for you. But when relationships are irreconcilable, the elevation of blood ties becomes a trap.

In Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, Irene and Isla have a shared distance to their half-sister, Agnes; dismissing her while assuming a relationship. “It is not my fault,” Agnes says to them at one point in the novel, “‘if you have certain expectations of our relationship that I have never invited you to have.” In another scene, Irene sits back in her chair and studies Isla. “Only you make me like this, she wants to say. You think I’m like this and that makes me worse”. And then, in an inevitable baton-switch, she makes her own supposition: “She has always felt Isla might quite easily turn out to be keeping a hunchback in a bell tower … or whatever else it is extremely uptight people often turn out to have been doing in private.” The joke houses her own assumption (Isla being uptight); failing to contemplate what makes Isla turn cold.

In Intermezzo, Ivan blocks Peter’s number after an argument at a restaurant. Soon after, the woman Ivan is seeing, Margaret, asks him whether everything is OK between him and his brother. He keeps his gaze downwards and says they’ve never really been friends.

“Yeah, he says. It’s whatever. You know, he told me once before there’s no point trying to talk to me, because I can’t speak any normal language anyway. And that I have a weird accent. International Chess English, he called it. The way I speak.”

His response is loaded with the fate of a failed sibling relationship: cached memories tailored to make the decision to end a relationship convincing. Yet the shards sound wrong. They sound like a man summoning past hurts in order to mask something that is harder to explain.

Since the publication of I Will Crash, I have met readers who bought the novel or came to events specifically for the recognition. Two sisters – friends with each other but mutually estranged from their brother – both bought the book and seemed energised. Another, whose estranged brother had died recently, knew it would be a hard read but felt gratified by the prospect. There was a recurring acknowledgment that this relationship was hard to find in fiction.

This new shelf of books – varied in style and approach yet grouped by an attention to the murkiness of sibling relationships – is not just a coincidence but an opportunity. Beyond the pleasure of language and craft, novels feed us empathy, recognition, different models for life. Here is an opportunity to sit more comfortably with imperfect relationships, and to be reinforced when life grants us situations that we can imagine better yet cannot resolve.

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