ABSTRACT
We now turn to two texts brought, on different levels and in different ways, into being by an appeal to a sister to write the story of her dead, dying brother. In previous chapters we looked at cinematic traditions and, through McCarthy, some very specic written traditions of queer and sibling relations in vastly different modes and worlds. In this nal chapter I look at two different texts from the 1990s – Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother (1997) and Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters (1999).2 Despite the radical generic, geographic and tonal differences between them both texts tell a remarkably similar story. In both a sister’s mourning for her brother’s death from AIDS becomes the occasion of, in Kincaid’s case, a resurrection on the level of writing and – in Palahniuk’s – a more literal (and utterly ctional) return of the dead sibling in a narrative addicted to classical modes of recognition. My ambition here is to outline the narrative similarities of
both writers’ work, to trace the relationship between – on the one hand – sibling love, queer attachment, returns from the dead and – on the other – the particular formal intensities of these two remarkable texts.
