Who's the Favorite?: The Loving, Messy Realities of Sibling Relationships

An award-winning documentarian and host of the popular Relatively podcast delivers the definitive book about siblings—often the longest relationships of our lives, and the least acknowledged.

For many people, relationships with brothers and sisters last a lifetime, spanning decades. Sibling relationships precede friendships or romances and outlast most connections to parents. Eighty percent of us have brothers and sisters who share our DNA and are often the unique keepers of our intimate histories. Our siblings can be our allies and our competition, our tormentors and our protectors, our best friends and our enemies. Research has found that these relationships are just as influential to our development as parenting.

Documentarian and celebrated podcast host Catherine Carr—herself a middle child—became convinced of the profound importance of sibling relationships. In Who's the Favorite?, she takes us on an unprecedented journey through some of the universal themes of siblinghood: designated roles and labels, friendship and enmity, shared trauma, family language and jokes, and separation and estrangement. Drawing on over seventy conversations she has had with pairs of siblings for her podcast, new research, studies by psychologists, and fascinating depictions in popular culture, she sheds new light on these vastly underappreciated relationships that profoundly affect our lives—relationships that are formative, vital, and full of clues about how to make sense of how we get on with others.

Part journalistic deep dive, part storytelling, part pop cultural critique, this conversational, illuminating, and endlessly absorbing work is a long overdue look at our sibling relationships and how they define us.

Catherine Carr is the middle of three sisters, and some say she started a podcast about siblings to finally get some attention. She has always been fascinated with people’s stories, spending a large chunk of her career producing BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and You and Yours. She has made many documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service and has won awards in London, New York, and Ireland for her work. She has created and produced several successful podcasts, including Talking Politics, and Relatively, which ran from 2020–2023. She lives in Cambridge, England.