She ain't heavy

One of my earliest memories is of being asked to move out of my sister's light. My mother has just returned from the hospital and photographs are being taken: initially of the three of us, me smiling, excited, glad to be reunited with my mother, if not the pale wriggling thing that everyone is inexplicably exclaiming over, but now someone -- my father? a grandfather? -- wants a shot of just the two of them, mother and baby. Not me. I must be standing too close, pushily asserting my primacy, and casting an unwanted shadow over the baby's face. This no doubt gentle instruction to move carries the sting of an unwarranted reprimand, bears all the metaphorical weight, I suppose, of the sudden alteration of my position in the family. At 3 1/2 I am an indulged only child, only grandchild, great-grandchild, niece, and until this moment I've never had to share any light, or anything, for that matter, with anyone. But now my secure little world is to be set upside down: I have a sister. Late last year this same little sister, Rebecca James, became a publishing sensation when her thriller, Beautiful Malice, was auctioned in the US and Germany for vast sums, going on to sell in numerous territories for more than $1 million. On hearing the news of my sister's phenomenal success first-hand I wept. And my tears were not shed out of an excess of sisterly pride, delight in her good fortune, but out of some obscure, but painfully sharp, sense of humiliation. Why her book and not mine? And what would this mean to my hard-won sense of being a writer, to have my younger sister so conspicuously outshine me? Once again, I'd been forced to give up my place; to share the light, unwillingly. Although the terms brother and sister, and all their derivatives -- brotherly, sisterly, sisterhood, brotherhood -- denote a state of not only kinship but accord, actual sibling relationships are rarely straightforwardly positive. Sibling relationships are complex, bonds of affection complicated and sometimes broken by competition and rivalry for resources and attention, for affection.