Parental Favouritism: A Guest Post by Fran Littlewood

A seemingly perfect family proven imperfect by a surprising revelation — Dad has a favorite daughter. Packed with humor, heart and fascinating family dynamics, this is a read that makes you ponder what it is to be a part of a familial unit. Read on for an exclusive essay from Fran Littlewood on writing The Accidental Favorite.

A British newspaper asked this month if I’d like to write a piece for them. It would need to be about me and my two sisters, the commissioning editor wrote in a short-and-to-the-point email, dishing the dirt (my phrasing!) on which one of us was the favourite child. Oh, and I’d need to to have a picture taken with them for publication. Failing that, there was a second option: I could write a piece about which of my three children was my favourite, and, naturally, have a picture taken with them – or maybe just a picture taken with the chosen child, it wasn’t quite clear from the email. Words both do and very much don’t fail me here… and I’m imagining the audible gasps/ splutters/ choked laughter of people reading this now. If there’s no such thing as bad publicity, it would certainly have been a plan. Needless to say – and although my middle daughter said to me ‘go on, do it, make it up!’, it was a hard no from me.

It serves to show though, the absolute taboo of parental favouritism. And it’s the reason I became obsessed with writing this book about a father of three adult daughters, who – following an almost-accident – inadvertently reveals that he has a favourite. It was so interesting talking to people in the early stages of the idea because everyone has a story – their own emotional baggage to unpack. (Including the friend who told me that she was her dad’s favourite, and that he’d left more to her in his will than her brother.) The fact is, we’re all conditioned to fight for our parents’ attention and approval, their love. It’s hardwired, and what particularly struck me as I researched the novel, was that this is something that continues into adulthood. Our childhood experiences cast a long shadow, so that at some level, we’re all still competing with our siblings to see how we measure up.

It’s something people don’t tend to talk about in families, and I wanted to crack open all the unspoken, hidden things. I wanted to write into the uglier spaces, to be as truthful as possible. So I put my characters – three chaotic generations of the Fisher family – into a remote glass house in the English countryside, somewhere wild and with nowhere to hide. It’s an exquisite, contemporary glass house, but there’s a seeping bad smell…

It also seemed the perfect jumping off point to look more broadly at comparison culture in womanhood. I’d felt frequently rated in the context of my sisters (by family friends, teachers, boyfriends), growing up as one of three, a set, and I saw so many parallels with the kind of scrutiny young women – my three daughters – were being subjected to, amplified more than ever by social media. The same insidious, damaging boxing-in, the shrinking, the ranking.

My fictional sisters, Alex, Nancy and Eva, are all, to some extent, grappling with the ‘scripts’ they can’t escape – the clever one, the pretty one, the screw up – and in writing these characters, I wanted to up-end these stereotypes. So that, for example, Nancy, the middle child, who’s regarded (and to a degree regards herself) as the ‘screw up’, clearly isn’t. She’s a doctor with a successful life. Certainly no more of a screw up than her sisters, anyway. And I think there’s a real universality to this. The Fisher sisters are each of them imperfect, as we all are, with layers and nuance and contradictions. I loved writing them, and I love them all like family! And I couldn’t possibly pick a favourite…