In the middle of my life, I ran into my sister. We hadn’t talked in two years. I’d like to report that we got into a huge fight. Or that we hugged and cried. Or that we picked up our conversation where we’d left it off and our story lines converged. But none of that happened. We just stood there last summer on Bernal Hill in San Francisco, where I walk every day with my dog and where the passage of time is marked by events as clunky as a fairy tale: the hill grasses turning green and then brown and then green again; the litters of coyote pups yelping under the same low bush on the east slope each spring. But where my relationship with my sister should have been was a sinkhole. She lives 30 minutes away, yet we’d fallen out of the plot of conflict and repair. As a result, we stood there on the paved, carless road with a great void between us.
All my life, I’ve loved a good quit. Leaving something broken always felt like freedom. Recently, I noticed I’d gained a lot of company in this: people online sharing testimonies of going “no contact” with relatives. The diction was always the same: I went no contact; I had to go no contact. I understood the appeal of the phrase — the sense of control; the determination to cast oneself as the subject of a bad situation; the surety of the women sitting in their cars, their faces filling our TikTok screens, pronouncing with youthful confidence, “I don’t fucking care if it’s your mom, your dad, your sister, your brother, your grandma, or your grandpa: If they’re toxic, then you have got to get rid of them.” It sounded so prudent, so clean, with its echoes of antiseptic pandemic DoorDash deliveries. It felt, as Eamon Dolan describes cutting off ties with his abusive mother in his forthcoming book, The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement, “liberating and joyful,” like “I could stand up straight at last,” like coming off “house arrest.” Heroic, decisive. Such a great plot.
Yet that’s not what I felt with my sister. In being estranged from her, I did not feel energized. I did not feel myself becoming “the master of my fate … the captain of my soul,” words I had rattling around in my head, thanks to my daughter, who memorized and repeatedly recited the poem “Invictus.” I just felt blank and bleak, outside the whole idea of transformation. I wanted to be in a better story.
So after the run-in, I started asking around.
The next day, I was on the phone with Kate. Kate is an identical twin, a relationship that’s arguably the Ur-text for sisterhood. If you can lose contact with an identical twin sister, this person who has been with you since conception and shares your DNA, what relationship is solid in life?
Kate, who’d turned her pain into antic humor, laid out her narrative for me. She and her sister, Jen, were born ten minutes apart to graduate-student parents who moved all over the world. When the two were children, the family lived in Southeast Asia. Locals screamed after the blonde twins: “Same, same! Same, same!” But inside their relationship, they were not the same. From the start, Jen was extremely dominant. Like many identical twins, Kate and Jen participated in academic twin research; the tests showed their relationship had a “significant power differential.” Jen bullied Kate. She instigated fights in which the girls scratched each other’s faces and pulled each other’s hair. Their parents’ interventions failed. Still, the couple persisted in the fantasy that their daughters were a functioning society unto themselves. You’ve got each other. You’ve got each other, Kate recalls her mother’s approach. But the girls didn’t have each other. When twins have a broad power differential in their relationships, the dominant twin often wants to obliterate the weaker one. “They don’t want to be a twin,” Kate explained. They want to be singular. The sisters’ parents unwittingly aided in Kate’s erasure. They often called both girls Jen, just like the students and teachers at school.
When the twins were 11, Jen made a new best friend, Lisette, at the local pool (Kate, Jen, and Lisette are pseudonyms). Lisette had a house full of pets and no twin sister. Jen started sleeping at Lisette’s house three or four nights a week. Kate became unmoored. She stopped eating. She stopped sleeping. Her handwriting grew tiny. Their parents nudged Jen to be kinder to Kate — do more than just ask Kate to find their pair of burgundy Wranglers so she could wear them. But this just irritated Jen and made her treat Kate worse.
When the girls were 12, an uncle came to visit. He gave Kate his advice: She could keep herself shackled to her sister, who, as the uncle saw it, had been trying to kill Kate since they were in the womb, or Kate could decide to be her own person. A week before their 13th birthday, Kate declared herself liberated. She seceded from what she called the “failed state” of their joint lives.
In their 20s, they tried to reconcile and came to blows again, when Jen accused Kate of stealing a ring. Years passed. Each sister turned to coping mechanisms (booze, food). They communicated exclusively through Jen’s children. “I felt just gutted and existentially alone,” Kate said. “I drank my ass off for years. The fact that I missed her but I hated her — I don’t think I’ll ever be emotionally mature enough or insightful enough to understand why she threw me out.”
This narration caught my attention. Why did she put it this way? Didn’t Kate break off from Jen?
Kate said, “She hung around Lisette, who was not related to us, and they just ran off from me all the time.”
It turned out Kate, too, had been struggling with the story, straining to tell it better. When she tried to unspool it for me orally, her mind darted off on a million chaotic tangents. “My superpower is making people forget what they were talking about,” she told me when I lost my train of thought. She’d signed up for a writing workshop, where she got help with a personal essay.
After reading the essay, I realized one source of the problem: In Kate’s estrangement story, like many estrangement stories, everything that happened after the rupture was dénouement. The narrative was not a hero’s journey toward liberation or repair. Nobody slayed the dragon or rescued the girl or found the treasure they sought. The last scene of Kate’s essay took place in November 1980. Kate called Jen a “fat cow” and told their parents that Jen “breached the twin contract to be together, to share things with me, to look out for me.”
What we owe our parents is relatively straightforward. What we owe our children is relatively straightforward. What we owe our siblings is far less clear.
In the absence of firm rules, I started reading around. Philosophy provides several theories of filial obligation that can describe what siblings owe each other as well. There’s the friendship theory (sibling relationships are largely discretionary: We owe our siblings what we owe our friends and should seek to enhance their well-being because we care about them); the gratitude theory (we owe our siblings for the care they’ve afforded us); the special-goods theory (siblings are uniquely positioned to provide each other with something positive, thus have a moral responsibility to do so); the family-belonging theory (families are strongest when each member feels a sense of belonging toward every other, so siblings have a duty to stay in relationship to meet this group goal). The best-known take on sibling obligation is defined in the negative: We are not our siblings’ keepers (and even the origins of this framework are a moral mess. In Genesis, Cain says to God after killing Abel, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”).
The social-science research on estrangement does not run deep. Even Lucy Blake, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of the West of England and a prominent academic in the field, admitted the discipline is “still in the early days” and, the trendiness of the phrase “no contact” aside, there’s no data to suggest that family estrangement is becoming more common. This is not to say the phenomenon is unusual. It’s not. About 25 percent of people will be estranged from a sibling in their lifetime. About 20 percent will be estranged from a father, about 9 percent from a mother.
Blake’s most recent study on sibling estrangement — based on research conducted through the University of Cambridge and Stand Alone, a charity that supports people out of touch with their families — revealed some common causes for sibling rifts. I heard from over 50 women estranged from their sisters, and many of the same themes surfaced. Betrayal. (My sister slept with my boyfriend.) Conflict over money. (My sister gaslighted our mother into disowning me and signing all of the family assets over to her.) Conflict over caring for aging parents. (My sister wouldn’t help take care of our homeless father.) Abuse. Addiction. Values. (My family FedExed me a card full of racial slurs after I voted for Obama.) Parents who favor one child over another. A sibling who sides with parents in a family rift. (My sister is sticking with my parents in pretending it’s fine that my father can’t see women as people.)
By far, the most common thread in sister-estrangement stories is a woman who struggles deeply with her mental health. “I would say in the majority of cases I see, the sibling typically has some narcissistic traits,” said Fern Schumer Chapman, author of Brothers, Sisters, Strangers: Sibling Estrangement and the Road to Reconciliation.
I heard from women diagnosed with borderline personality disorder who told me they were “always incredibly different” from their sisters and those sisters didn’t share their desire to be best friends. One explained she was “what I now understand is called the identified patient” — in family-therapy terms, the individual blamed for the group’s dysfunction. “My sister doesn’t have the tools to understand who I am in this world,” she said. Then she added, contrasting herself to her sister, “I would never shut the door on family forever. That’s not the kind of person I am.”
I heard from women who tried so hard to stay connected to their “unwell” sisters and still, one day, those sisters just disappeared. “I wish I had done something really awful so that I could process it better,” one of these women told me. Sometimes she even reads her sister’s old rageful emails to hear her voice. The lack of closure is agonizing. “It would be better if she just died,” she told me. “I feel like I can handle death. I wouldn’t think about her still, still there.” Sometimes she puts $100 bills in the mail. She hears nothing back.
The broken sister relationship can be so agitating. So itchy. As Kate the twin put it, “I feel the pain of having lost an arm, of having had my arm amputated, almost daily.”
The stories I heard did not take one shape. Sometimes estrangement followed an explosive rupture and reaching across the blast crater just felt too hard. Other times estrangement resulted from disinterest and drift in sisters who never formed a solid connection at all. I identified with parts of dozens of women’s story lines, but none of these narratives felt completely right. “Not everyone is made for each other,” a friend finally said to me. “Why are you poking the bear?”
When you hear one side of an estrangement story, often you can also hear echoes of the other side as well.
We both moved back into our father’s house to help him as he was dying, and I would make simple requests like, “Could you move some of your stuff out of the garage? Could you tell me if you’re going to have a man sleeping over?” My sister felt so judged.
Or: My sister thinks I’m rich because I work at a high school in a fancy California city when the real issue is she lives in Bumfuck, New York, in the middle of the state, in the farmland, in the middle of nowhere, and in her little Bumfuck, New York, community, her therapist led her to believe I abused her as a child, which is ridiculous because if you look at pictures of us when we were young, I weighed about four pounds and she was … I’m getting deep in the weeds here. She was a big girl. She was heavy. She was, at some points, diagnosed as obese.
When you’re estranged from your sister, the story of how you got there feels like life and death. When you’re outside the situation, it just sounds like life: intense and boring, often at the same time. The thing you’re talking about is never the thing you’re talking about. The harder you think, the less you know. I kept turning over in my head a line from a book called Intimate Terrorism: The Crisis of Love in an Age of Disillusion, by Michael Vincent Miller. In it, he’s writing about marriage, but he could have been describing many of the estranged sisters I spoke to. They loved each other, but the whole setup for their relationship felt existential, like “two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one,” Miller described.
My sister raised me — she’s eight years older — and now she can’t stand that I’m more successful than her.
I was constantly being criticized, treated in a dismissive way. Meddling, meddling. The only explanation I have is that she never found agency in her own life.
My sister stopped talking to me after I told her it was a bad idea for her suicidal ex-husband to watch their son while she went to work.
Last summer, I ran into my sister. For a few minutes, we asked about each other’s kids, but I had nothing I really wanted to share, and neither did she. Eventually my dog started misbehaving, which was a relief. He’s part boxer, part Chihuahua, and he runs up and barks in pit bulls’ faces. As I often do, I envied his stupidity — his gleeful, repetitive dysfunction, his full-hearted commitment to keep performing the same fruitless act.
I said to my sister, “Okay, nice to see you,” and she said, “Yeah.”
That’s it. I walked home. I don’t know where she went.
I want something better to happen next, but I don’t know what it is.
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