BROTHERS, SISTERS, STRANGERS

Estrangement from a sibling can be psychologically fraught—and reconciliation even more so.

Journalist and writer Chapman opens with the revelation that for almost 40 years, she and her older brother did not speak. “I can’t recall a specific fight or incident that led to our estrangement,” she writes. “We simply didn’t have much to say to each other, and in time, we said nothing at all.” Decades later, she began to search for connection. Such estrangement, she observes, is something that seems nearly incomprehensible. Everyone understands divorce and parent-child friction, but a gulf between siblings is a mark of failure: “If she can’t maintain a relationship with her own brother, is she capable of sustaining any relationship?” Finally making contact, she discovered, in a revelation whose details are forthcoming in fragments, that the real alienation was between her brother and her “tyrannical” father, with whom she got along better than her brother did. Her brother self-medicated and hid himself away. The fact of a breach is not unusual, writes the author; sibling relationships are fluid, “dynamic and sometimes volatile, with peaks and valleys.” An argument over some simple thing—who will host a holiday dinner, say—can lead to years of silence. According to one survey of adults ages 18 to 65, “only 26 percent enjoyed a healthy sibling relationship characterized by frequent contact and low competitiveness.” Maintaining the separation, Chapman writes, can be as psychologically difficult as the initial breach, and mending it even harder. She suggests being very careful of monitoring each other on social media, a source of division among the healthiest of us, and stresses the importance of overcoming self-imposed exile. After finally rebuilding some of the lost relationship with her brother, Chapman offers a few pointers: Maintain boundaries, avoid hot-button topics, and know when to switch to another subject or walk away from a squabble.

A primer in mending familial fences blended with an affecting memoir.