Helen Rubinstein's fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Ninth Letter, Salon, Salt Hill, Witness, and elsewhere. She is a member of Brooklyn's Trout Family of writers, and an MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she is working on a book.
Her story, "Two Sisters," appeared in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist
Here, she speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about doubling, perspective, and sibling fights.
Could you talk about writing “Two Sisters”?
My younger sister was visiting me in Brooklyn, and we got into a fight. The fight was about an omelet, but it was also about something else, and she accused me of always starting this same fight. While she was crying, I huffed off to my bedroom and realized she was right. That’s when I began to write “Two Sisters”—while weeping from anger and shame.
After that, “Two Sisters” became this fun place to return to when I was tired of whatever else I was supposed to be writing. It was more language-playful than the other work I was doing, and more image-playful, too. I played with it until I liked it (not always the case: often, I seem to play with my writing until I can’t stand it anymore). I don’t think my sister and I have had the fight since.
In “Two Sisters,” you do something really brilliant with point of view. At times, the reader experiences all three main perspectives,the I, the you, and the they. I love how this makes the reader feel that the narrator is telling them a story, in person, though it’s not just any story, but instead, a story that the reader should already know (“Now, you must have heard about the cold snap.”) Could you talk about incorporating this style into this story?
Thanks for describing that so kindly! I’m not sure exactly how deliberate it was—I don’t remember thinking about it before it happened. But as a reader and as a writer, I definitely think it’s fun to begin a story from one angle—here, omniscient third-person—and then introduce a kind of pinhole to see out of. I think of the “I” and “you” as pinholes: reminding us of their existence (which also reminds us that this is a story being told) anchors the third-person narrative in a sort of social space.
I also think of it as a way of breaking the claustrophobia of the third-person. I think I was trying to do something similar with tense in the first section, jumping around to break the claustrophobia of the present.
The Two Sisters seem to me to be the same (if iterations), in all of their appearances (even, in fact, when the crying pair meets with the laughing pair). I—and perhaps this is my own bias, since I am a sister—could even see the I/you interactions as two sisters. Could you talk about how these doublings occur? (Or, if you believe they occur at all?)
I do believe they occur! That was one of the best discoveries in writing this—how, though the specific details or settings would change, something in the sisters’ relationship remained fundamentally the same. The relationship is imbalanced, but it’s not clear (to me, anyway) exactly how, and neither of the sister-individuals is ever very clearly defined. I guess I was hoping that, by looking at the two sisters from so many angles, I might somehow hone in on two-sisters-ness, so that the relationship itself becomes the central character.
I didn’t know at the time I was writing this that Lydia Davis has written stories titled “Two Sisters” and “Two Sisters (II).” The fact that these exist seems to confirm the archetype, even if her stories are about slightly more specific sisters.
Could you give us a few reading recommendations?
Helen Phillips’s And Yet They Were Happy is an inspiration. Nicholas Muellner’s photo-essays Amnesia Pavilion and The Photograph Commands Indifference are mind-alteringly great. And Jillian Weise’s The Amputee’s Guide to Sex reminds me that good writing begins with having something to say. Joan Wickersham’s The News from Spain, Miranda July’s It Chooses You, and Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? most recently delighted me.
Also, I always recommend rereading Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.
What other writings can we expect from you?
An alternate, semi-collaborative version of “Two Sisters” called “Sisters Trout” is actually coming out in Trout Family Almanac from Papercut Press sometime this fall. “Sisters Trout” was an experiment in taking all of another writer’s editorial advice as blindly as possible. The Almanac is a collaboration between a group of fiction writers from Brooklyn College’s MFA program called the Trout Family. All of the stories are loosely linked, and it should be juicy fun.
I’ve also got an essay coming out in Slice magazine’s Issue 13, and an essay just out in Best Women’s Travel Writing Vol. 9, reprinted from Witness. I wish I weren’t too superstitious to talk about less-certain expectations! But I am.