If you’re reading this, my sister is dead. I may be dead too, but that’s beside the point, for you if not for me. Many years ago I resolved not to write about her while she was alive, or rather not to publish anything that I had written. She – Gill – had walk-on parts, like a film extra, in two memoirs I published about our parents: And When Did You Last See Your Father? in 1993, and Things My Mother Never Told Me in 2002. That’s all it was: the odd look-in or passing mention. There was plenty to be said but not yet. Even if she had given me carte blanche, the page would have stayed blank. You can’t write an honest memoir when the subject is alive. At any rate I can’t. Death is the only permission.
After those books about Mum and Dad came out, I was sometimes asked if I had another memoir in me. No, I’d reply, I write fiction these days because I’ve run out of family. Once or twice I answered even more facetiously: I don’t know if I’ve another memoir in me but my sister’s quaking in her boots. There’s an assumption that to write honestly about someone is an act of aggression; that’s the gallery I was playing to. But I felt no aggression towards Gill – didn’t then and don’t now. She’s gone, that’s all, and though there’s no retrieving her I’d like to make sense of who she was and what she became. It wasn’t just that she changed over time. She could change from day to day. Drink made it worse but the origins went deeper. You never knew which you’d get, the kind and loving Gill or her doppelganger. Two sisters.
