How has the experience of siblinghood been transposed into literature? In three famous examples, through the dramatic surrender of one’s life (Antigone), through species transformation (The Metamorphosis), or through simple erasure (In Search of Lost Time).  In the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, Christine Smallwood surveys these canonical texts and more; Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Jane Bowles’s “Camp Cataract” are just some of the many titles that she brings together. Her wide-ranging piece “Brothers and Sisters” attends to their infinitely varied portrayals of the “intimate difference” of the sibling relationships in fiction.

Recently, I caught up with Smallwood. We talked about how siblings figure in our development of an identity, reading sibling characters versus writing them, and yet more novels that didn’t make it into her essay. We also considered the meaning of living in a world increasingly bereft of siblings.

Jasmine Liu: As I grow older, I find that I think more and more about how I’m an only child. It’s become central to my identity. I wonder if birth order is something you’ve thought about more as you’ve grown older.

Christine Smallwood: I’m the younger child of two. In some ways, I have a lot of younger-child qualities, but my older sibling is not a classic older sibling. Older siblings are stereotypically responsible, parent-pleasing, overachieving, and that dynamic was not true in my family. Birth order doesn’t explain everything about my own sibling dynamic, but I can definitely see it play out with my children, and it’s obviously a real thing in the world.

Liu: This piece grew out of a class you taught at Columbia University. I’m curious about the genesis of that class, and how you designed the syllabus for it.

Smallwood: A few years ago, I was thinking about The Topeka School—Ben Lerner does not put his brother in this book that’s so clearly drawing on autobiography. That was a really noticeable alteration from life into literature. I thought about how different that book would have felt—and whether it could have worked—if there were two children in that family, or whether that book needed the protagonist to be an only child. 

Then the same topic came up when I wrote a short book about Chantal Akerman’s film La Captive. I consulted Marcel Proust for that; he takes his brother out of his autobiographical novel. I’ve been working for several years now on my own novel that has sibling dynamics in it. All of that stuff came together, and I designed a syllabus to teach at Columbia. A lot of the books on that syllabus were books that are mentioned in the essay. I just taught books that I wanted to read.

Some of the students in the class thought that they were going to read books about big families. I taught many books that were hothouse, two-children families. By the end of the semester, some of the students were like, We actually can’t take any more of these crazy, intense, claustrophobic, neurotic books. That was a completely fair critique from them. But I also taught memoir in that class. We read John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers, which is an amazing book, and  Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother, which is one of the best books about siblings that’s been written. 

Do you have a favorite book about siblings?

Liu: One novel that comes to mind is Howard’s End. That sibling relationship is the heart of the book; Margaret and Helen are such opposites. 

Your piece got some of us at Harper’s to read The Loser, which is one of these claustrophobic books.

Smallwood: When I got to the end of the piece, I did notice that there were a lot of really dark books. One of the best books about siblings, which I didn’t talk about in the piece, is Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays. It’s an extraordinary work with amazing characters and a narrative point of view that moves from person to person in a seamless way so you don’t even notice when the baton is being passed. She does some really interesting things with leitmotifs. She has these little tags for characters that keep coming back, like in music. I was sad I couldn’t do anything with it in the piece. A piece has its own life and its own prerogatives; there was no space for it.

Liu: You write about how siblings are really rich terrain for fiction, but I thought that perhaps siblings are the richest terrain for critics, because they’re marginal figures.

Smallwood: That would make sense. Because I came to the topic as a critic, right?

Liu: Do you think about siblings differently as a critic or as a reader, versus as a fiction writer?

Smallwood: As a writer, it feels very different than the parent-child relationship on the page. It’s a bigger betrayal to bring a sibling to life. It feels like this person who doesn’t deserve to be portrayed or drawn on, even—I’m not writing a work of memoir. But it feels more loaded to me. I would want to be extra careful. The sibling relationship is more fragile than other relationships, because it has that quality of being chosen or arbitrary. I say this in the essay, but there’s just no cultural mandate to be close to your siblings. Siblings can walk away from each other pretty easily. Of course, this is all just generalization and projection because you could come up with a million examples and counterexamples.

Liu: As your fact-checker, I noticed a comment you left in your draft regarding the Indian state of Kerala, which expanded its childcare program so as to free older sisters to go to school. I found that fascinating.

Smallwood: That’s something I learned from Juliet Mitchell’s book Siblings. She’s a feminist psychoanalyst. For a long time, psychoanalysis didn’t deal with siblings front and center; she really brought that relationship into the discipline. She says that people in the West would assume that sending young girls to school would be good for their mothers. But actually, it turned out to be good for their older sisters. This is really tricky terrain. I thought a lot about to what extent the piece would hold up to scrutiny—because these ideas about family relationships are so contingent and culturally determined.

Liu: You write about how, in the nineteenth century and before, large families were core to the novel. You wouldn’t have batted an eye as a reader if there were a family of four or more kids. There’s a lot of family-related anxiety in our political discourse having to do with the declining birth rate. What kinds of effects do you think this will have on fiction?

Smallwood: Doesn’t it feel like novels are getting lonelier, and that there are fewer people in them than there used to be? It’s hard to deal with a lot of characters. In a lot of the contemporary works of fiction that I read, people don’t have friends, or people are drifting from place to place, or they’re in their own minds. 

Liu: When we think about utopian rhetoric, oftentimes it’s framed in sibling rhetoric: brotherhood, fraternity. On the other hand, you quote Adam Phillips, who says that under socialism, siblings will just be friends, and that they won’t be defined by familial bond. Is utopia one big family, or does it get rid of the idea of family altogether?

Smallwood: I know that family abolition is a thing that people are into. I actually love the family. I love being in a family and having a family; destroying the family is not my politics, although I understand that it is an interesting politics that people have. Adam Shatz has an essay for the London Review of Books which mentions in passing that Martin Luther King Jr. used the rhetoric of brothers and sisters in the civil-rights movement whereas activists today use the rhetoric of “allyship.” I think there is something really hopeful about the idea of being so bonded to the people with whom you are in political struggle that you would consider them a family. That’s also probably because I grew up going to church, where you talk about being brothers and sisters in Christ. That rhetoric I still find very powerful.