ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My fascination with the sibling bond has been a lifetime thing, with its roots sunk deep in my own relationships with my four brothers and my little sister—Steve, Garry, Bruce, Adam, and Allison. It is to them that I owe the first and greatest thanks for making this book possible. In ways big and small, I have always learned from them—and in ways big and small, I’d like to think I’ve given back in kind.
I owe another debt of gratitude to Carolyn Sayre, a former colleague at Time magazine, who ably assisted me in researching this book, and who—both at Time and in this project—has never been anything but a delight and a consummate journalistic professional. I hope we have the chance to work together again.
Thanks, too, go to Time. This book began as a pair of cover stories I wrote for the magazine in 2006 and 2007, and I was generously permitted to repurpose those stories and the reporting behind them here. The interviews and research I conducted in preparing those pieces were more than matched by reporting files contributed by a number of Time’s field reporters. Those journalists are Jessica Carsen, Wendy Cole, Dan Cray, and Sonja Steptoe.
The world of sibling research is an increasingly well-populated one, and it would hardly have been possible to interview every investigator at every college, university, or lab who is now exploring the field. I did try to sample as widely as possible from the most prominent researchers doing the most revealing work and, as is often the case, the more deeply I dug, the more names I found. The psychologists, sociologists, and other scientists or experts who agreed to be interviewed or whose work was cited in this book are:
Susan Averett, Lafayette College; Paula Avioli, Kean University; Jennifer Barber, University of Michigan; Lew Bank, Oregon Social Learning Center; Victoria Bedford, University of Indianapolis; Anthony Bogaert, Brock University, Ontario; Bo Cleveland, Penn State University; Katherine Conger, University of California, Davis; Ben Dattner, New York University; Lisabeth DiLalla, Southern Illinois University; Judy Dunn, King’s College, London; Patricia East, University of California, San Diego; Toni Falbo, University of Texas, Austin; Mark Feinberg, Penn State University; Catherine Hamilton-Giachritsis, University of Birmingham; Frederick Gibbons, Iowa State University; Deborah Gold, Duke University; Judith Rich Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption, among other works; Mavis Hetherington, University of Virginia; Sarah Hill, Texas Christian University; William Ickes, University of Texas, Arlington; Jennifer Jenkins, University of Toronto; Laurie Kramer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Debra Lieberman, University of Miami; Eleanor Maccoby, Stanford University; Shirley McGuire, University of San Francisco; Susan McHale, Penn State University; Douglas Mock, University of Oklahoma; Virginia Noland, University of Florida; Thomas O’Connor, University of Rochester; Robert Plomin, King’s College; Joe Rodgers, University of Oklahoma; Karen Rook, University of California, Irvine; Hildy Ross, University of Toronto; Catherine Salmon, University of Redlands; Ritch Savin-Williams, Cornell University; Nancy Segal, California State University at Fullerton; Daniel Shaw, University of Pittsburgh; Clare Stocker, University of Denver; Jim Snyder, Oregon Social Learning Center; Jennifer Steeves, York University, Toronto; Elizabeth Stormshak, University of Oregon; Frank Sulloway, University of California, Berkeley; Corinna Jenkins Tucker, University of New Hampshire; Kimberly Updegraff, Arizona State University; Walter Vandereycken, University of Leuven, Belgium; Paul Vasey, University of Lethbridge, Alberta; Tony Vernon, University of Western Ontario; Brenda Volling, University of Michigan; Tom Weisner, UCLA; Shawn Whiteman, Purdue University; Alan Wichman, Ohio State University; Robert Zajonc, Stanford University; and Richard Zweigenhaft, Guilford College.
In citing the experiences of actual siblings, I have used the subjects’ ages when the interviews were conducted, which in some cases was 2006; I have also altered some names, particularly in the case of children, whose relationships and life situations may have changed considerably in the intervening years.
As always, I can’t say that this book—or any of my others—would have ever seen the light without the wise guidance of Joy Harris, of the Joy Harris Literary Agency. We’ve been on a long journey together—and it’s one that I trust is not nearly over. Thanks as well to Jake Morrissey of Riverhead Books, who took a shine to the idea of a book about brothers and sisters—and provided me a much-needed six-month extension when the vagaries of life made that necessary.
Finally, my deepest love and gratitude to my wife, Alejandra (the middle sister between two brothers), and our daughters, Elisa and Paloma, who daily learn the joys and rewards—and occasional challenges—of sisterhood. Thanks to all three for tolerating the lone male in our elegant house o’ chix, and, I promise, no more working on weekends (for a while, at least).