The unconscious suffering of the replacement child | Letters

Kristina Schellinski on Louise Gluck and Annie Ernaux, and Jim Cosgrove on why overdoing the labelling of children as replacements' is offensive

Re Mary Adams' letter (Louise Gluck and the trauma of being a replacement child, 2 December), children born into grief or even conceived in order to replace a missing sibling deserve recognition and compassionate help to heal their trauma. They deserve a chance to understand the special circumstances of how they came to live their life as replacements and how to start over, to rediscover their own, their original and unique life.

Louise Gluck, the 2020 Nobel prize in literature winner and Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel prize in literature winner, are both replacement children. Gluck's poems and Ernaux's novel The Other Girl give comforting insight into this trauma. I would love to see these two poets discuss their creative ways of working through it, getting back their self-esteem, their own identity, working through survivor's guilt and grief, and maybe discovering in this process a deeper meaning to their life: an existential discovery as reward for their soul-searching.