While exiting the BQE this morning and listening in on a conference call, I thought about

• The fact that Amazon book reviews are kinda like primary school book reports, minus the free Pizza Hut
• Except people rate your review based on whether or not they agree with it, not the quality of it
• Which maybe, depending on your teacher, is a sub-bullet of point one
• The fact that I didn’t read books critically (that is, noticing authorial technique) until, like, I was almost thirty

Anyhoo I’m off the OnlineDating.com sauce and thus have been reading lotsa books again, a la ANP v. 0.6 - 2.2. Here’s the first of my book reports, originally posted last December to Amazon.

The Normal One: Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling

At times, reading this book was so difficult I had to close it for a while. The feelings that it brought up were so intense, raw, and neglected for so long that it was difficult for me to face them. Reading this book has made me realize that in my plight I am not alone, and that there are actionable steps I can take in order to heal myself. Some key quotations from the text that I, personally, found poignant:

(Healthy children) grieve, they feel guilty, and they struggle to compensate by achieving for two.

Fixing the unfixable, or saving the irredeemable, is a frequent occurrence in sibling dreams… Dreams in which a sibling no longer has the disability … gives a brief respite that is both painful and pleasing to recollect.

(The ‘normal’ one’s) everyday trials and tribulations pale beside the catastrophe of their sibilings’ predicaments, so it seems natural that they should never come first… As a result, many healthy siblings grow up with a hunger for attention that it never satisfied and that seems wrong to feel. Their needs, so consistently ignored, become invisible to themselves.

The fallout from being invisible is to become self-effacing; perverse preeminence breeds perfectionism, morbid self-criticism, and fear of failure… Excelling is not an ideal; it is an emotional life preserver.

… a nameless anxiety haunts them and makes everything they have seems (sic) tenuous or undeserved… compulsive self-sacrifice driven by the belief that you do not deserve your advantages… At significant moments… it is excruciating to know how much better off you are and always will be.

As difficult as it was to read this book and grapple with all that I had so conveniently ignored for so long, recognizing the common traits of ‘normal’ siblings is key to becoming whole. Safer outlines those traits to be:

• Premature maturity (”… expected to shoulder … responsibility … w/o complaint.”)
• Survivor guilt (”Every achievement is tainted…”)
• Compulsion to achieve (”… must succeed for two…”)
• Fear of contagion (”… secret conviction that normality is tenuous or a sham.”)

If you are a ‘normal’ one and are ready to face the issues that come with that head on, check out this book, grab a box of Kleenex, and find a quiet place to hunker down. As Safer writes, “It is no crime for your own life to come first.” There is no time like the present to start living it.

The Normal One: Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling