All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
“I don’t know how to… hate… you…”
As children, my sister Bella and I had our own anthem. It was a bastardized version of a song from Jesus Christ Superstar, the words of which we’d reformed to suit our needs. We’d narrow our eyes, lower our voices, advance until we collided, teeth bared and nails out, laughing as we rolled across the floor.
Bella was two years old when I was born. Our mother—single, barely out of her teens—arrived home to her third-floor flat on Camden Road and set me down on the bed. She didn’t immediately respond when my crying drifted through to the kitchen, but when the noise escalated to an ear-piercing scream she rushed to my side. Bella was beaming. “I told the baby to be quiet,” she said. She’d caught my cheek with her nail. Beads of blood were blooming. Mum turned on her. Her first daughter had transformed into a threat; her second, tiny in comparison, defenseless, had become the one she must protect. And so the dynamics of our relationships were set.
I’ve always been interested in birth order. How the roles are laid out from the start. The expectation that the elder sibling will be responsible and high-achieving, while the next child will placidly follow in their wake. I admire those who rebel, those with the courage to leap over the boundaries. I’m aware myself how carefully the younger sister needs to tread, how mindful she must be not to threaten the equilibrium, not to blossom too early or too obviously, if she wants to keep her sibling as a friend.
Recently I met a woman whose daughters were openly and miserably competitive. Both clever, the younger had the effrontery to be popular and sporty, too. By their mid-teens the elder had sunk into despair. In their 20s they embarked on couples counseling together. It only took a few sessions, and newly united, they turned around and blamed their mother. The woman laughed as she told me this. She was just glad, she said, to see them getting on.
I read that Tina Knowles took her girls to therapy when Beyoncé’s success began affecting the confidence of her younger daughter, Solange. It helped, apparently, but would it have worked so well if the global superstar had been the youngest member of the family? Would Solange have been able to operate in a shadow cast from below?
Historically, we have always been fascinated by little sisters who overturn the family order. Anne Boleyn not only dislodged Henry VIII’s wife in her bid to become queen, but also his mistress—her own elder sister. Mary Boleyn was considered more beautiful than Anne, but not perhaps as ambitious. A generation later, Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth I, had to await the death of her half sister, another Mary, to secure her place on the throne of England, where she reigned for 45 years.
Growing up, I took on the traditional younger sister role. Bella was quick and outspoken, while I was what was then politely termed “vague”—unable to read until I was 10, climbing in most nights beside my mother having yet again wet the bed. I did want to be noticed, but I also saw the benefits of invisibility, even wishing for it when I saw the trouble that both my sister and my mother’s fiery personalities attracted. I’d stay quiet, listen, and watch. A game I liked to play was to lie behind the sofa, pretending to be dead. I’d wait and wait for anyone to notice. But it was worth it when I heard my mother tell a friend what an amusingly eccentric child I was. It was the first time I became aware of having an identity, other than as Bella’s sister. And being Bella’s sister was a defining part of my life. At school, at home, in the stories that I told myself, the stories I told her. Right through our childhood I was convinced that through the luck of our connection, I was twice the person I might otherwise have been.
I was 14 when she left home, and when I found new friends who knew nothing of her existence, their interest in me was a revelation. It surprised me too how fast I grew into the space she left behind. How much I liked it. Until then I’d felt her influence at all times. Her opinions, her condemnation, the reflection of her glamour. “Are you Bella’s sister?” people would ask me. We have always looked remarkably alike. And I’d take this as a compliment, and was proud to say that yes, I was, even when sometimes they went on to inquire why she was so rude. “She’s not rude,” I’d insist. “Just short-sighted. If she’d known it was you…”
Once, someone rang me from a hotel room, insisting the party Bella and her friends had cajoled her into having had got out of hand. “Are you Bella’s sister?” she asked, and when I said I was, she ordered me to come and help her clean it up.
In literature too, birth order is a common concern. When the youngest sister in Pride and Prejudice elopes before the others are even engaged, the whole structure of the family is threatened. The literary world has equally long been fascinated by the rivalry between two of its leading novelists, the late A. S. Byatt and her sister, Margaret Drabble. Recently I heard Drabble—the younger—explain in an interview how her sister never forgave her for having the temerity to publish a novel before she’d had a chance to do so, not when she knew her sister’s ambition had always been to write. Even when Byatt went on to win the Booker Prize, the bitterness between them never entirely dissolved.
Fortuitously, my debut novel, Hideous Kinky—based on the years Bella and I spent traveling in North Africa with our mother when we were very small—was published the same year that Bella launched her womenswear collection, winning young designer of the year, while my book was optioned for a film. We were bonded, all over again, not just by our challenging and peripatetic childhood—the need to keep each other safe—but by the adventure of our self-made lives.
In the decades since, we have watched each other closely, comparing our successes and our failures in both work and love. Striding ahead, falling behind. Every new pitfall is an opportunity for discussion. Hours and hours of conversation, every last detail of our lives examined.
“I wish I had a sister,” my own daughter has sometimes complained, sandwiched as she is between two boys, and I have wondered who she’d be if I had provided one. There have been other times too, when, shocked by Bella’s forthrightness, my daughter has looked at me, appalled. “Or maybe,” she’s conceded, “it’s good to be the only girl.”
“I don’t know how to… hate… you,” I hum to myself. No one can know, if they’re not embroiled, the heady pleasure of feeling yourself so entwined. Just last week I was walking across Hampstead Heath when a figure called out through the bushes: “Are you Bella’s sister?”
