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'Sirens' Shows We Just Can't Get Enough Of Toxic Sisterhood
Lately, it feels like every time I turn on the TV, a sister is doing something unthinkable. Gaslighting her sibling. Stealing her boyfriend. Faking her own death to ruin her life. Sisterhood, that age-old shorthand for unconditional love, has gone dark – and we can't stop watching.
From the calculating twin gynaecologists in Dead Ringers and the scheming siblings of Bad Sisters to the most recent Netflix and Prime thrillers: The Better Sister and Sirens, mainstream culture is fascinated with the kind of bond that cuts both ways – deep love and deeper resentment in one fraught, inseparable package. Because nothing hurts like family, and sisters have an unmatched capability to twist the knife.
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And it's not just on our screens, our bookshelves are also amuck: Esther Freud's My Sister and Other Lovers, lays bare the complex mesh of fear and mistrust between sisters whilst Favourite Daughter by Morgan Dick has two women working together as therapist and patient – with no idea that they're in fact sisters.
I should admit upfront: I'm part of the hysteria. In my new novel Selfish Girls, I write the about an uninhibited, dysfunctional family. It's a pressure-cooker narrative about the pain we inflict on those we love most: our sisters. Writing it, I kept asking myself: what happens when a sibling becomes both your witness and your rival?
It's true that toxic sisterhood has always been in the narrative fold. From Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? where sibling rivalry curdles into psychological horror, to Atonement and the O'Haras in Gone with the Wind, fiction loves to recognise the emotional volatility built into sisterhood.
Even soap operas from Dynasty to EastEnders have mined the vein of sisterly sabotage for decades. We have ancient archetypes of this uneasy alliance with the Graeae: three sisters who shared a single eye and a single tooth, passing them back and forth in a choreography of dependency and distrust. There's something eerily familiar in this arrangement. It mirrors the way sisters – in fiction and real life – must negotiate shared identity, resources, even attention. The myth captures the essence of what today's tales are digging into: how love and resentment often share the same body.
If we're in a golden age of complicated women and problematic sisters are the star, where has the sudden surge in interest come from? What links all these stories is a shared fascination with how female closeness can curdle. We're no longer in the land of heart-warming sisterly support (no offence, Little Women). Instead, we're watching women who grew up in each other's shadows, trying to forge identities outside the sibling dynamic, and often failing spectacularly. This duality is exactly what gives these relationships their cataclysmic charge. Sisters know your history; they know your secrets. They share your DNA and your damage. 'Sisters are our first friends and first enemies,' writes Tessa Hadley. And when things go wrong between sisters, it's never just about what's happening now; it's about decades of unspoken competition and those roles inherited in childhood that are never quite escaped.
'When you look in the mirror, your difficult sibling always looks back, though the image is distorted. In the shadows lurk parts of yourself and your past that you don't want to notice. Behind the reflection, silently influencing the interaction, stand your parents, your grandparents, and all their siblings,' writes the psychotherapist, Jeanne Safer, in her book Cain's Legacy: Liberating Siblings from a Lifetime of Rage, Shame, Secrecy, and Regret.
How fascinating then, that the crux of our relationship with our sisters is steeped, not just in our own dynamic, but in the lineage of misgivings from the past. Tensions sharpened across generations. Perhaps that's why the emotional pitch of sisterhood can feel so extreme, so polarised, capable of flipping without warning from love to hate.
In fiction, these bonds tilt toxic not because sisterhood is broken, but because it's perceived as unbreakable. Sisters have become the stage on which we can rehearse the ethics of our desire – betrayal, manipulation, cruelty is all made permissible by the assumed resilience of the bond. Only a sister could be trusted to hold our most dangerous fantasies and unimaginable transgressions. It's this unique containment, this charged intimacy, that makes for reckless, potent, unfettered (and ultimately interesting) characters.
These stories don't erode the sanctity of sisterhood; they prove its strength. Afterall, we would forgive our sister that which we would not forgive anyone. In fiction – if not also in real life - when she fakes her own death, steals your identity, or frames you for a crime she committed – that's not betrayal. That's just not-so-sisterly love.
Selfish Girls by Abigail Bergstrom is out on 10 July. Pre-order here.
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