“One of the benefits of growing up with a sibling is having a witness,” Sigrid writes in one of her twenty-one attempts at a suicide note. Siblings provide corroboration. Having a witness also presents a complication: you will always have competing narratives, competing truths of your shared childhood.
This is the matter at the center of Emily Austin’s third novel We Could Be Rats. The novel follows sisters Sigrid and Margit, who grew up sharing a bunk bed in Drysdale, a town worth visiting only if, according to Sigrid, one “wanted to feel jaded, be hatecrimed, or…had a hankering to try fentanyl in a basement.”
Margit and Sigrid are opposites. Sigrid is a high-school dropout, working part-time at the Dollar Pal, and longing for her childhood days of make-believe and play. Sigrid’s greatest ambition is to be a rat at a county fair, riding the Ferris Wheel and eating discarded fair food. Margit, her older sister by only a year, is the responsible and practical one. She got good grades and moved away for college. Margit never understood why Sigrid couldn’t bite her tongue; Sigrid never understood how Margit could.
Though the opposite sisters are a well-trodden character dynamic in fiction, Austin makes it feel distinct. The text highlights the sisters’ differences not through conflict with each other, but rather the ways they are separately and uniquely in conflict with their past. One of the ways this is accomplished is through descriptions of how they played as children. Sigrid was interested in other-worldly imagination, pretending that the pink insulation in her family’s unfinished basement were clouds over a city she built of her toys. Margit played at being a grown-up, stuffing a pillow under her shirt to feign pregnancy and said a “bad guy” was after her. She would hide under the bed and tell Sigrid to be quiet.
These methods of play characterize the trauma responses both sisters developed to survive the volatile household they grew up in, where their parents’ fights were loud and unpredictable. Sigrid chooses escapism, first in her basement world and then with her best friend Greta as they explored Drysdale. Margit chooses hypervigilance of other people’s emotions in an effort to prevent outbursts from her parents, even if it meant hiding her own emotions. Sigrid instead imagines that her parents are swamp-monsters when they are angry, with scaly green skin and tentacles growing out of their heads. If it’s a fantastical world, maybe it can’t hurt her.
We meet these sisters as they teeter on the crisis points of their coming-of-age, their traumatic childhoods behind them, the vast unknown of adulthood ahead. The novel captures this crisis point in three darkly funny and voice-driven sections from different points of view. In “Sigrid’s Note” she tries to soften the unsoftenable, her attempted suicide. In “The Truth,” Margit, in first-person, must contend with the aftermath of the attempt. And finally, in “Sigrid,” Sigrid, awake from a coma, documents her recovery in a therapy journal. These sections put Margit and Sigrid’s divergent experiences and coping mechanisms in conversation with each other, revealing how they both stem from the same events—for example, the time their dad punched a wall in their bedroom, the death of their grandmother—that they both revisit multiple times.
Their escapism and vigilance aren’t working out as well as they planned. Margit begins to experience the physical and emotional ramifications of constantly dialing into everyone else’s emotions but her own. She lives on edge underneath her upstairs’ neighbors explosive fights that she can’t try to control like she once did with her parents. Sigrid’s penchant for escape has morphed into total detachment and depression at the loss of her best friend Greta to opioid addiction. She avoided growing up as long as she could, dropping out one class shy of her high school degree, and she still longs to play pretend but has no one to play with. Even when she tries to escape through her imagination, the darkness of reality – the loss of her best friend, the disappointment of her parents, the letdown of adulthood – still seeps in.
As both sisters return to the same events over and over again in these pages, they realize that there is only one other person who can corroborate those events, even if the way they tell the stories and dealt with the events are different. We Could Be Rats reveals that part of growing up is accepting that competing narratives can and must co-exist.
FICTION
We Could Be Rats
Emily Austin
Atria Books
Published January 28, 2025
