Sisterhood of the Traveling Stories: On the Literature of Fictional Sisters

“Sometimes I think, She’s so funny and smart and interesting,” Kim Deal famously said about her twin sister and Breeders bandmate, Kelly Deal. “Other times I think, Oh my god, I want to take a knife and gouge her eyes out, she’s getting on my last nerve right now.” I grew up idolizing Kelly and Kim, and their complicated relationship only made them more compelling to me. Behind their icy, onstage bickering, I sensed their deep connection and mutual artistic respect. I envied their tempestuous intimacy, and the way their (loving!) volatility worked its way into their music.

After my parents’ divorce, I eventually wound up with six much younger siblings, but I spent most of my childhood as a solo latchkey kid, singing along with the radio, dreaming up my ideal sister and bandmate. She’d have my same face but wild, curly hair. She’d play the guitar effortlessly (I never could get the hang of it), and our voices would harmonize perfectly. Maybe we’d argue sometimes, annoy each other, but she’d know me better than anyone.

Two sisters sit at the center of my debut novel We Were the Universe. They’re musicians too, and Kit—the narrator and protagonist—idolizes and envies her younger, more talented sister. “We sang together as soon as she could talk. Both of us had an ear, but Julie’s voice was a thrum, a squeeze. My soprano was clear but too obvious. Thirsty. I belted like a child actor. Julie’s alto came through rich and husked, raw, a voice that triggered devotion.”

In high school the girls start a psychedelic rock band, and Julie brings out the best in Kit, musically. “I’d fumble through the ladder of notes, different fills until I found her register. Together, we made a third voice. When things hit just right, we’d turn our heads and almost expect to see some new, blended girl in the room with us.” When Julie begins to struggle with addiction, she and Kit become dangerously codependent, helplessly enmeshed. Even after Julie’s death, Kit believes her sister is attempting to communicate with her, that the two of them are transcendently linked.

Because complicated sisters have always fascinated me—whether they be messy or sweet, tender, cruel or a little of everything—I didn’t have to reach far to come up with this list of fictional favorites.

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Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy

The first paragraph of Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy is perfectly emblematic of the sticky toxicity sisters can share:

Spending time with my sister, Debbie, was like buying acid off a guy you met on a bus. You never knew if it would end with you, euphoric, tanning topless on a fishing boat headed for Ensenada, or coming to in a gas station bathroom, the inside of your eyes feeling as though they’d been scraped out with spoons. Often, it was both.

It’s the “both” that captivates me—the way sisters can be so explosively unpredictable, can so suddenly shift their mood and allegiance. When Debbie disappears after a wild night of eating pills at Salvation, a trashy Los Angeles dance club, Madievsky’s unnamed narrator is pulled into a quest to find her sister and—now that their destructive relationship has somewhat dissolved—to find her own identity as well.

These charismatic sisters come through in gorgeous acoustics (Madievsky is also a poet), exuberant dialogue, and a plot so addictive you’ll try to gulp it down all in one go.

Vauhini Vara, “I, Buffalo” (from the collection This is Salvaged)

In the short story “I, Buffalo” by Vauhini Vara, an alcoholic woman comes out of a blackout with the vivid memory of vomiting somewhere in her apartment—but where? She wakes “to the smell of spoiled fish and a fierce headache,” and she flashes on her last meal, “a takeout box of sushi and a bottle of wine.”

She stumbles from room to room, tracking the odor. Before the woman can solve this horrible little mystery, her (successful, judgmental) little sister calls from the road. Her sister, the woman remembers with terror, is coming in from out of town to spend the weekend at her place.

I can’t imagine a funnier, more exquisitely tense set up for a sibling story, but Vara’s unique blend of dark humor, empathy, and wit ultimately take the narrative somewhere whimsical, emotional, and totally unexpected.

Cecily Wong, Kaleidoscope

Riley and Morgan Brighton—the dynamic, beautifully rendered sisters in Cecily Wong’s Kaleidoscope—are opposites in many ways, but they love each other tremendously. They are close-knit, well adjusted, and supportive (without giving too much away, the opening scene exemplifies the way siblings bond during hard times, showing how resilient they can be when tackling problems together). When a sudden tragedy strikes, Riley is forced to reexamine her relationship with Morgan, with herself, and with the world at large—she sets out on a radiant path of discovery.

Kaleidoscope is impeccably structured and thoroughly researched—it’s about sisterhood, but it’s also part adventure story, part travelogue, and there’s even a little bit of mystery mixed in. Wong’s dry humor and careful observations underpin this moving, ultimately hopeful novel.

Joy Williams, “The Girls” (from the collection The Visiting Privilege)

I absolutely revere Joy Williams. She is my literary lodestar, someone whose work I come back to again and again. Her hilarious and very bleak short story “The Girls” features two emotionally stunted, unnamed sisters in their thirties. They live at home with their parents (they still call them Mommy and Daddy) and their bird-murdering cats. Williams has written these sisters so that they are indistinguishable from one another—they share every action and line of dialogue.

While the sisters are enthralled with each other, they find the rest of the world to be exceptionally boring:

The girls had never been in love. They did not plan on marrying. They would go to the dance clubs and perch on stools, in their little red dresses, their little black ones and white ones, darling provocative tight little dresses, and they would toss their hair and laugh as they gazed into one another’s eyes. There were always men around. Men were drawn to them but one would not be courted without the other, even for amusement—they would not be separated.

“The Girls” is unsettling and unforgettable, and it culminates with the revelation of an unimaginably cruel act from the past. Like everything Williams writes, it shimmers with bold style and odd specificity.

Nora Lange, Us Fools

You’ll have to preorder Us Fools, a debut novel by Nora Lange that comes out in September, but trust me, your future self will thank your present self! Brainy, troubled sisters Joanne and Bernadette Fareown came of age amidst the ’80s Midwestern farm crisis, and though they struggle to stay meaningfully connected in their chaotic adulthoods, they are forever linked by their fraught, traumatic past.

Narrator and younger sister Bernie deftly contemplates Jo’s mix of menace and charisma:

My sister was better, brighter, quicker. She was good at using knives to skin animals and to thinly slice potatoes. People wanted to be close to her, as one is taught to keep your enemies near….When you were in her presence the imperceptible hairs on the back of your neck would rise in tickling horror.

This dazzling contradiction brilliantly illuminates Bernie’s complicated feelings for Jo. Meanwhile, Lange’s achingly stylish prose, brutal humor, and ferocious wit set this novel apart—she captures the tender and complex ways that growing up and growing older can impact sisterhood.

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We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons is available via Knopf.