What Prince Harry's Autobiography Taught Me About Sibling Relationships
Or, I read Spare and realised I am far too like Prince William for my own comfort
My younger sister was born two and a half years to the day after me. I came into this world in deepest midwinter, when most of the day was shrouded in darkness and the lights of Christmas were down to their last embers. My sister’s birthday, on the other hand, falls on midsummer’s day when the sun is at its peak and it feels like nighttime will never come. It’s possible that the timings of our births explain why I like nothing more than huddling in front of a fire after a frosty morning walk and my sister feels totally at home in the blazing heat of the Australian outback. Just one of the many ways in which we are opposites.
In a room of 100 people, you wouldn’t instantly pick me and my sister as the two who were related. For a start she’s about five inches taller than me, something I’ve always been deeply envious of. She’ll be rocking jewellery with skulls on it and yet another new tattoo, while I will be dressed in whatever happened to fall out of my closet first. She’ll talk to you about music and art, I’ll veer between feminism and Love Island. I would tell you that my sister is much, much cooler than me and she’d tell you that I’m much cleverer than her - neither of us would be 100% right. What you might be able to guess, however, is our birth order. And not just because despite being a smoker, she has far fewer wrinkles than me.
Sibling relationships have had more prominence than usual recently because of the publication of a certain book - Prince Harry’s autobiography. I read it and really enjoyed it. Is it a work of literary genius? No. But it zips along at a good pace and a nice mix of humour and pathos. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Should it have been written? On the whole, I think yes. But it doesn’t really matter what I, or any of us, think on that count as it’s out there and seemingly half the world has bought it.
What I took away from it - more than the frost-bitten penis or the awkward loss of virginity - was the importance of his relationship with William. While Meghan only makes an entrance in the final third of the book, William is there the whole way through. The relationship between the two of them is the one that shapes Harry’s whole life - far more so, I would argue, than his relationship with his mother.
Traditionally when we talk about relationships we tend to focus on either romantic relationships or the relationship we have with our parents. But for most of us the longest relationship you’ll ever really have is with your siblings. They’re there from the early days of your childhood and all things being equal they’ll be with you well beyond the death of your parents.
From a psychological point of view sibling relationships are particularly interesting because they mirror so many of the other relationships we’ll have in our life. Depending on where we are in the family order we might feel like we have to be the responsible “parent” or the “naughty child” to our siblings. We also have our first experience of that “us against the world” bond that we so idolise in marriage when we team up with a brother or sister to go against our parents. We experience sibling rivalry which will then be echoed in our working lives with colleagues and we can feel intense loyalty that is an early understanding of what it means to be a friend. And of course, they’re the people that we first use to define ourselves against. By not being our sibling, we start to outline who we are as an individual.
One of my earliest memories of my sister and I involves a row about a T-shirt. We were in a shop in our local town, one of those strange all-purpose shops that exist in small countryside towns. It sold trinkets and gift wrapping and books and clothes. On this particular day it was selling a range of Hypercolor t-shirts. If you were born in the ‘80s then there’s a good chance you’ll remember Hypercolor. It was a line of clothing that changed colour in the heat, or really it changed colour when the wearer started sweating. A blue t-shirt would certainly acquire bright pink patches under the arms. For reasons that now seem unfathomable, I thought this was incredibly cool.
My sister and I were browsing through the shop and I found one of these T-shirts which not only changed colour but also featured a caricature Mexican man asleep under a sombrero on the front of it. I LOVED it. (Did I mention it was the ‘80s?). I begged my mother to buy it for me and when she agreed I was beside myself with delight. Until I realised that my sister had picked up the same T-shirt in another colour and we’d be matching.
My memory on what happened next is blurry. I can’t remember who was more horrified about the matching T-shirt situation, was it me or my sister? I definitely remember throwing out a few cries of, “why does she always have to get everything?!” I know for certain that the yellow and orange version that my sister had chosen made it home with us but who owned it or whether I also had the blue and purple version I can’t tell you. But the pull to be separate, that I can remember like it was yesterday.
In Spare, Harry recounts a similar situation. He talks about his mother’s love for dressing the two of them in matching outfits and how they both hated it. But William hated it a little more than Harry. For Harry it was the chance to follow in his brother’s footsteps, to show he was part of the gang that had been created before he arrived. For William it was yet another reminder that try as he might to set himself apart there would always be someone else there. That his brief period as an only child was over.
I suspect all sibling issues are magnified when you’re worrying about whether or not your brother wants you dead / will die and make you king. But in Spare I saw some of my own problems with being a sister mirrored in William’s behaviour. What Harry sees as coldness I see as a response to feeling that as the eldest you always have to be the one that keeps it together, that shows the younger sibling how it should be done by setting a “good example.” I’m sure there are first-born children out there who have cast off all responsibilities and flatly refused to ever be the one that steps into the parental role - I wish I had been more like them.
But Spare also made me see things from the younger sibling’s perspective. When he talked about trying to forge a relationship with a brother who wanted to be left on his own, I was reminded about all the times my sister tried to keep up with me and all the times I left her behind. When he admits to not knowing what his role was, I thought about how clear being an older sibling was. My job was to set the path, to be the responsible one, to achieve all those dreams my parents had held for their child before either of us had existed. And while that role might have felt suffocating at times, at least it was clear. In Harry I saw my younger sister trying to work out what the expectations for her were, when I had taken all the original ones.
Fundamentally though, I saw in Prince William my own need to be doing, to be constantly moving forward because in the movement we feel safe. When you’re moving you don’t have to feel. And in Prince Harry I saw the sibling who was left with all the feelings. The role of doer in the family was already taken and so instead he sucked up all the emotions that swirled around, like a sponge that was never wrung dry. For so long I’d thought about how tiring it was to be the doer of the family but I’d never given any thought to how much work my sister had done, feeling all those emotions the rest of us ignored.
Spare begins and ends with separation, with two brothers trying to manage the same situation by running in different directions. I know what that feels like because for years my sister and I lived, both literally and figuratively, on opposite sides of the world. We’d run as far away from each other as we could and yet we were always connected by this strange thing that is being a sibling. At the end of last year we went out for lunch, just the two of us, for the first time in a decade and it was nice. You could almost say, sisterly.
Do you have brothers and sisters? What was your role in the relationship and how has it changed as you’ve all got older? I’d love to hear about it in the comments. And of course, if you’ve got views on Spare, feel free to share those too!
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I still need to read it! As the eldest of five siblings, I identify so much with what you have written about, in movement you feel safe resonated a lot!