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?
