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Novelist Emma Babbington reflects on growing up without siblings in the 1970s and 1980s, describing how the experience drove her to collect friendships and inspired her new book, HQ Books.
Novelist Emma Babbington says being an only child gave her the exceptional skill of making friends at speed, a gift she has carried from childhood into her 50s.
Her new book, published by HQ Books, explores this lifelong search for connection and sister substitutes. Babbington describes herself as someone who collects friendships rather than someone content in her own company. One of her closest friends has four sisters, or maybe five, she can never quite remember. When some or all of the clan gather, her friend sends photos of them around a huge kitchen table.
Babbington always smiles at how they are faint facsimiles of each other, with DNA imprinted on high cheekbones and heart-shaped faces. After replying what a lovely family, she feels a small, unattractive sting of envy. She imagines these sisters have multiple group chats where they swap news and intimacies with efficiency and fondness. There is no need for preamble because they are forever attached and dependable.
As a person without siblings, this is what Babbington imagines being a sister means. Her friend often half-jokes that she has no need for more acquaintances. When Babbington suggests she meet an interesting new person, the response is always the same: that shop is closed, I have got enough friends. Between these moments, Babbington realised her friend's attitude may come from growing up as one of many siblings.
Only Children Seek Sister Substitutes
Being an only child, she says, means always being greedy for more friends, more connections and more sister substitutes. From her observation, only children fall into two camps. There are those who collect friendships, and those happiest in their own company who can be content with or without companions. She falls joyously and unashamedly into the first group.
Babbington loves nothing more than meeting new people, and she really loves a new best friend. It sounds childish, she admits, but it is a delight to discover a special someone with a shared interest or viewpoint, then learn about their earlier life and hopes for the future. Her mother, herself also an only child, takes credit for this. I always socialised you, was and is her mother's battle cry whenever the topic of Babbington's sibling-free status comes up.
She did, and Babbington is grateful for it. Perhaps this sociability, combined with the lack of brothers or sisters, explains why she has been seeking out substitutes ever since. Missing sisters and estranged sisters always find a way into her novels. Despite people telling her that having a sibling is not all it is cracked up to be, she never quite believes them.
The cliche about only children is that they are not good at friendships, too selfish, spoilt and probably a little socially maladjusted. This attitude was confirmed repeatedly while she was growing up. Being an only child in the 1970s and 1980s was a relative rarity, and it was often made clear to her that the absence of brothers or sisters gave her an in-built set of deficits. She probably could not share or play nicely, went the theory.
Challenging Only Child Stereotypes
She would be self-centred and spoilt. She was likely precocious and a bit too adult. The lack of rough-and-tumble with a sibling meant she would be thin-skinned. While she likely had, and still has, some of these traits, she also had something else.
That something was the only child's exceptional skill of making friends at speed. On holiday as a kid, she learnt quickly how to ingratiate herself into the worlds of other children and their gangs of siblings. A smile, a hesitant amble in their direction across the sand, casually watching what they were doing for a few moments, waiting for the glance and the question do you want to play with us.
Then she would nod and settle in next to them to build sandcastles, cartwheel or play tip. She knew, even then, to hold back. To not be too keen. To not show her hand.
To be cool. And it worked. In primary school, she was always surrounded by friends. By age nine, she had already clocked up four or five besties.
Building Friendships Through Decades
By her teens, she had added two more. At a new school, another. At university, her first male best friend. Several more were added in her 30s, amid the whirlwind and isolation of early parenthood.
In her 40s, when the same women groaned at the idea of socialising at the school gate, she felt happiness at the thought of finding her new people in this unfamiliar next stage of life. Now in her 50s, she hopes there will be more close friendships to come. And she is optimistic. When she looks at the older women around her, she is struck by the way this skill for connection seems to grow as the decades tick by.
Perhaps we know innately its importance, she writes, and how it helps inoculate us against the isolation and loneliness we are told are so harmful as we age. But with those extra years comes nostalgia. Babbington is as ridiculously sentimental and wistful about old friends as others are about former romantic entanglements. She has regrets about those she lost touch with, or who drifted away.
There is one best friend whose name she frequently Googles. They were each other's other half in their early teens, and they lost touch decades ago. Babbington has never stopped hoping they find each other again. While the search engine never comes up with anything new, she knows she will keep trying. Her book, published by HQ Books, is out now.
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brisbanetimes:There were so many stereotypes about being an only child. But it gave me this powerThis story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
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