How to Be a Sister Turns 16!

My first book was published sixteen years ago this April. If she were my kid, she’d be driving.

Like most teenagers, it seems like just yesterday that she was a baby. How to Be a Sister is a memoir about my sister Margaret, who has severe autism. The book chronicles the heartbreak and hilarity of our childhood and my journey to reconnect with her as an adult.

I started writing HTBAS out of a deep desire to be heard. Throughout our childhood, people reduced our circumstances to consumable platitudes: My sister was somehow angelic in her disability, and I was, by relation, a better person. There may be some truth in there, but reality was more complicated when Margaret was hooting with laughter during my high school boyfriend’s piano recital or melting down at my wedding brunch.

In its early stages, the book was Called Please Don’t Spank the Waiter.

Anyone who knew us would laugh when I mentioned the title understanding it was just one example of how some commonplace activity could go sideways with Margs. But the agents I pitched to didn’t get it. Since they were stand-ins for potential future readers, I took the note and renamed the book.

The Oregonian published an excerpt and in a moment of blind enthusiasm, I sent it to a writer I admired—Terrell Harris Dougan, who’d written a book I loved: That Went Well: Adventures in Caring for my Sister. Terrell kindly connected me with her agent who found a home for HTBAS with Matthew Lore at The Experiment. Matthew has kept the book in print all these long years. Thanks to him, HTBAS was published in Portuguese in 2019 and, in 2022, saw an audiobook. (I narrated it and learned so much about what not to eat for lunch when recording.)

I’m forever grateful to everyone who helped get this book published. Most of all, I’m grateful to my sister.

While it was not easy, she made my childhood interesting. And as I’ve continued to write more books, it’s clear that Margaret helped me become a writer. She made me pay attention to the world around us—usually in an attempt to help her or to forestall calamity. However, in the process, she helped me become a writer.

As Mary Oliver writes in her poem “Sometimes,” “Instructions for living a life: / Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.”

Happy Birthday HTBAS, and thank you, Margaret Garvin.