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When I was asked to review Juliet Mitchell's latest book about siblings, I was coincidentally immersed in Blake Morrison's memoir, Two Sisters (2023), and also a collection of writings about siblings entitled Sisters Come Second (LRB Collections 12, 2023), in which I had just come across Colm Tóibín's description of a “lifelong battle or strange lifelong connection between two siblings” (2023, p. 4). I had a memory, too, of reading Martin Amis' memoir, Experience, in which he writes that he used to do “terrible things” to his little sister Sally:
From my bed I once flung a small pair of scissors at Sally, or in her direction, as she slept. The point struck her forehead—and yet she slept on. Only when I was wiping away the few drops of blood did she stir. “What are you doing?” she asked. “I'm just wiping your brow.” Then she said, unforgettably, “Hanks,” and, with a sigh, resumed her rightful slumber. (Amis, 2000, p. 148)
Morrison's sister, Gill, died in adulthood of alcoholism (as did Amis' sister Sally) and Morrison's half-sister, Josie, committed suicide. At some level, both men have remained preoccupied by the sadness of their sisters' lives and deaths, and the parts that they—surviving and successful male siblings—may, or may not, have played.
For novelists, dramatists—psychotherapists too—the nature of sibling relationships is of great interest. Not so for the theoretician in Mitchell, who maintains: