Abigail Pogrebin

Oct 2009

---

• Category:

---

How does one write personally about being an identical twin without exposing one’s twin in the process? 

            I discovered it’s impossible.

            I set out to write a book—ultimately titled One and the Same—which told the unvarnished truth about growing up as a double, a project which meant burying myself in mountains of articles, studies and tomes by virtually every twins expert in the world, and interviewing twin after twin about what the experience was really like.

            But over the course of two years of work, I realized that every question I asked as a reporter was fueled by my own questions as a twin. 

            Every study made me think about myself.

            Every revelation about genetics, biology, or child-rearing was heard or deciphered personally.

            I couldn’t escape my own perspective, no matter how impartial I tried to be.  And my outlook was not an uncomplicated, rosy view of twinship; there were hurdles and landmines to being raised in tandem, which I felt I needed to examine.  Though Robin and I are still deeply, unshakably close, we’ve had fissures which mirrored those described by other twins I spoke to.  Twinship can get in the way of friendship, especially when one’s identity has been muddled or blurred or by having a constant carbon-copy by whom everyone is measuring you.

            I quickly saw that the spine of the book had to be my own story, because readers relate to real experience, not just research, and because my lifetime with Robin was the lens through which I was learning.

            The hitch was that deciding to speak honestly about myself meant implicating another person: my sister.  And that was tricky territory for us to navigate and discuss.  Robin writes for the New York Times and always prefers to maintain a reporter’s remove.   Though she encouraged my book from its inception, she wasn’t the one who had decided to write it; suddenly our relationship was being revealed in a way she hadn’t necessarily planned and sometimes she balked at the disclosures.

Because I anticipated Robin’s misgivings, I tread carefully through the process: instead of summarizing her feelings in the book, I interviewed her formally—as I would any subject—and let our Q & A exchange stand alone and apart from the other interviews in the book, without editorial comment.  I made sure that she spoke for herself and then read every word more than once.  I let her excise anything that made her squirm.  

But even tiptoeing as I did, what I couldn’t forsee was that writing even part of the book as memoir meant a leap into vulnerability, and it’s difficult to take that leap for someone else.   Now that the book is out, friends and colleagues are emailing or calling Robin, asking the same question: “Are you okay with this?”  And every time she’s asked that question, I worry she regrets having given me her blessing in the first place.

The truth is, I think her greatest act of love and loyalty is that she not only edited the book and allowed her candor to remain in it, but she let me go ahead and publish it.  That was not just an act of bravery but fidelity.  Recently, I received a note from a friend who had just finished the book: “It’s clearly a love letter to Robin,” he wrote.  “She must be very proud.”

The truth is, I’m not sure exactly how she feels about it and I think it’s better to wait to ask her.  What I do know is that she’s very much still at my side, no matter what her ambivalence may be.  And I also know that as familiar as we were before this book, we know a lot more now.  So maybe the greatest exposure, at the end of the day, has been to each other. 

• Category:

---

"Painful honesty and scary insight."

-Patricia Niemeyer

Link: Gemini Crickets - Parents of Multiples Clubs of Silicon Valley

Abigail Pogrebin’s latest book “One and the Same” details a unique perspective of the phenomenon of twins with sometimes painful honesty and scary insight. As a mother of three year old twins, I find most of my decisions limited to toddler-focused issues like how to get my kids to eat vegetables or which preschool to enroll them in or how to discipline them. Abigail’s book is a wake up call that the well being of my children involves much more than meals, academics, and obedience.  Crucial to my children’s happiness and overall health is their sense of identity.  Abigail raises issues specific to “twinship” that I had mistakenly tried to ignore hoping that if I ignored the fact that they were twins it wouldn’t matter. Backed by scientific research, she points out time and again how the very existence of two individuals fostered in one womb and born only minutes apart will always be an immovable defining relationship.  She has extensively interviewed physicians and researchers who concur that there are ways that parents can help foster healthy twin relationships.

But Abigail’s book is much more than a compilation of research facts and data.  She has included the personal stories of a variety of twins.  Some have gained strength from their twinship, such as the professional football players or the Holocaust survivors she interviewed.  Some have deviated drastically from the twinship, in one case going so far as to change genders.  And some have lost their twin, whether in the womb or later on in life from disease, suicide, or tragedy such as September 11th, with devastating consequences and subsequent moral dilemmas.  Some of these stories are encouraging and reassuring while others are cautionary tales for me.  I find myself insinuating my perspective as a mother into each of these stories feeling a gamut of emotions from elation and joy to overwhelming fear and sadness.  God willing my children will grow up to have a story of their own to tell.

Perhaps what I applaud Abigail Pogrebin the most for is her courage to reveal the intimate details of her life in print.  She is an Ivy League educated accomplished writer and producer who lays bare her own twin angst for all to read.  To my surprise, her relationship with her own twin Robin is less than ideal and Abigail is not afraid to address it.  In fact, her analysis of her relationship with her twin sister is the thread that holds this engaging book together.  I feel as though I travel the journey with her and, in doing so, get to sneak a peek into a life that I, as a non-twin, will never experience or fully understand.  In the end, thanks to Abigail’s beautiful writing, I get the privilege of being that much closer to my children.  Thank you, Abigail.

• Category:
• Reviews & Praise

---

"Pogrebin's words seemed spot on..."

-Sarah Kliff

Link: The Twin Stands Alone

Abigail and Robin Pogrebin’s childhood as identical twins reads like a symmetrical storybook: Robin dressed in red, Abby in blue. They slept near each other in cribs, then bunk beds, shared birthday cakes and ate the same number of Oreos after school. The Pogrebins attended Yale together, graduated, and moved into an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And when people inquire, “What was it like growing up a twin?” Abby gives her standard answer: “It was great.” And it was, she says, but that three-word answer betrays a complicated, nuanced relationship. “I never explain ... that Robin has spent the past five years pulling away from me. Or that I want more of her,” Abby writes in her new book, One and the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I’ve Learned About Everyone’s Struggle to Be Singular (Doubleday, 2009). Being a twin, Pogrebin explains to me over the phone, “looks idyllic in many ways because so many people idealize it. While I do think a lot of that is true, it comes along with more intensity and complexity than I ever found explored in anything that had been written.”
So Pogrebin set out to explore it herself, hoping to understand her relationship with Robin by speaking with other twins and the experts who study them. She spent two years meeting with more than 40 sets, from NFL football players Tiki and Ronde Barber to Holocaust survivors to conceptual artists. “I found that unpacking twinship means exposing the tension between being one and the same,” Pogrebin writes near the end of her book. “I’ve tried to explore what it takes to ultimately forge individuality, but I also set out to examine sameness, because it’s integral to every twinship and how its perceived.”
As both a twin myself and a journalist who has covered multiples in the past, Pogrebin’s words seemed spot on, an honest explanation of how multiples feel about the relationship into which they were born. It’s a balancing act between same and different that is both enviable and deplorable. Twins have the rare comfort of going through life with a constant partner. As one tells Pogrebin, “We’re all looking for that relationship that twins were born with. Everybody wants to be loved that much.” But at the same time there’s a competing desire to be recognized for one’s own accomplishments and merits rather than your duplicity. Being a twin means vacillating between these two poles, attempting to land at a comfortable place. In that sense, Pogrebin’s book is a larger exploration of identity: how we make ourselves unique in a world of millions and establish our singularity when so many of the people we know do the same job as us or come from the same background.
On the morning her book hit the shelves, we talked about the tension of growing up fused, the most interesting twins she met, and how the book has impacted her relationship with Robin.
Up until now, there’s really not much in the way of twin memoirs. What got you interested in writing a book about your experience growing up an identical twin?
I had never found anything on the shelf that accurately reflected what it’s like to grow up a twin. I think it’s an easy relationship to oversimplify. It’s become the stand-in metaphor for what we all search for, someone who understands you without saying a word, someone who is your perfect match and other half. I think a lot of that is true. What was missing were the adult twin voices to say, “This is what it feels like, this is why it’s emboldening, this is why you feel strengthened, but here are all these reasons why it can muddle your own sense of self.”
In talking to so many twins, what did you find out about what it means to be a twin, what that relationship means?
So much of what I discovered is hard to put into words. If you start saying, “We’re so close, we talk about everything,” peoples’ eyes roll over. A lot of twins’ relationships are irrational and ineffable. There’s a power to it, an obligation, a sense of being truly responsible. Without even really realizing it, Robin is one of the forces that keeps me afloat every day. Or there’s Greg Hoffman [who lost his identical twin brother on September 11]. So many people have said to him, “Get over it, you’re an adult, you have a family, you have other siblings, it’s time to move on.” But that will never happen for him because this was his identical twin brother.
What surprised you about twins in writing this book?
I think what was surprising was how the intimacy that can be so uplifting can also in a way be stunting. It can keep you from learning how to do friendship, make you lazy about other relationships and unpracticed. You’re so used to a partner and sidekick and a backup that you don’t develop those muscles sometimes. I think in a way, for Robin and me, the twinship ended up getting in the way of our friendships. I saw that for a number of twins, where you’re growing up alongside someone.
You include a number of really heartbreaking stories about twins, like the man who lost his twin on September 11, and the identical brothers who both lost children to Tay-Sachs. Why did you feel those were important to explore?
Twin loss kept coming up, almost hitting me in the face. This is so fundamental, when a twin loses a twin or when a parent loses one twin. You have people saying, “You have another living healthy baby, you’re lucky enough,” but they’ll always feel like they have twins. The Lords [Charlie and Tim, the brothers who both lost children to Tay-Sachs] always stayed in my mind. It was so unimaginable. But it was so clear talking to them that the twinship was not just integral to why it happened but also to surviving it.  It was such a distillation of when twins can hold each other up.
Who were the most interesting twins you talked to?
I think the Lords, partly because of the way they talk in the same room is so effortlessly in sync. They were so comfortable in their intimacy. They’re two men, again living very separate lives, but there’s something so unabashed and sweet about their love for each other and I envied that. And then Ronde and Tiki Barber, they’re almost a cartoonish version of twins. They to me are sort of the paradigm of what twinship should look like. I asked them if they argue. And they looked at me like, “Are you kidding, you guys argue?” You should hear Robin and I, of course we argue. It was something so stripped down, the way we all idealize twins.
Was it difficult to explore your own relationship to your twin sister, Robin, to admit that you want to see her more than she wants to see you?
I think it’s still difficult to this moment, now that the book is out. I called Robin early on, when I was steeped in research and panicking, and she said. “You need to start with yourself.” I felt like that was a tactical way of saying, “I give you my blessing.” But it’s still more exposing than I anticipated, and I think Robin has some discomfort with that. Robin has read every word of it, so it’s not that I’m ambushing her. On one level, this is a very clumsy way to write a letter to her I’ve never had courage to write, expressing things about our relationship I’ve never said.
Near the beginning of the book, you and your sister get a genetic test to confirm that you are monozygotic. You describe your eyes tearing up when you get the results, and they confirm that you came from one egg. Why was that so emotional for you?
There’s something about you being kind of invested in the phenomena. It confers something on you. This just happened, you and your brother happened. It confirms, yes this is special and it is still unique. I was tense about that genetic test. We weren’t sure we were monozygotic, and that would really be embarrassing to write an entire book and be wrong.
As twins become more common, do you think they’ll continue to mystify us?
It’s still mystifying in the sense that it’s bizarre. Even when I see twins, I take a second look. I confer a certain intimacy on them. The presumptions are still there. What I think is missing is a little bit of the novelty. Robin and I were shaped by that celebrity, where you were special before you opened your mouth. I think you take that away and you’re changing the landscape. So I do think that’s going to happen. We are saturated. At a certain point it’s like, “I’ve had it with litters of children.”

• Category:
• Reviews & Praise

---

---

• Category:
• Interviews
• Video

---

Download

Here's an excerpt of my interview on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" program:

 

ROBERTS: You write that you're still struggling with this sort of fundamental oxymoron that what makes you unique and standout and special, is actually that you're not unique - that there's someone exactly like you.

Ms. POGREBIN: That's so well put and I think it's the conundrum people don't realize when they look at twins. There's an assumption that it's this idyllic relationship. And in many ways it is. I mean, you come into the world with someone and you're never alone, you're never, kind of, floating out there by yourself, making your way. You always have an ally. You always have a backup. You always have a support system. But you're also always compared to someone else, always measured against someone else. And if you're identical as Robin and I are, you're constantly confused with someone else.

NPR's Talk of the Nation

• Category:
• Audio
• Interviews

---

Having a body is confusing enough, but what if someone else had the exact same one that you do? That’s the issue, more or less, that Abigail Pogrebin tackles in One and the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I’ve Learned About Everyone’s Struggle to Be Singular (Doubleday, October). A former television producer and a daughter of Letty Cottin Pogrebin—not to mention the force behind Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk about Being Jewish—Pogrebin also happens to have an identical twin sister, a New York Times reporter. Gathering twins’ stories and memories, and studying up on the science behind their relationships, Pogrebin offers insights into a strange, familiar phenomenon.

Josh Lambert, Tablet 10-19-09

• Category:

---

[Click Here to go to Vanity Fair]

• Category:

---

Double Day Interview with me on One and the Same
Download

• Category:
• Audio

---

Sep 2009

Here is a profile Kevin Filipski wrote about me for the Westside Spirit:

"It Takes Two"

As a twin whose sister writes for the New York Times, Abigail Pogrebin seems uniquely qualified to author a book titled One and the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I’ve Learned About Everyone’s Struggle to Be Singular. But she didn’t think so at first. “It was percolating in a way I didn’t necessarily confront, and every time I considered exploring it, it got so personal that there was no way to separate approaching it as a journalist and as a twin,” said Pogrebin, an Upper West Side native and former 60 Minutes producer. “I finally decided to not be frightened by the fact that it would be personal.” Of course, since the book covers her life as a twin, including a visit to Twinsburg, Ohio, which hosts an annual twins convention, her family is included, especially her twin sister. Abigail Pogrebin’s new book reflects on her life as a twin and profiles the unusual experiences of other twins.

Read the rest at the  Westside Spirit.

• Category:
• Interviews

---

Page 8 of 11 pages « First  <  6 7 8 9 10 >  Last »

---

Showstopper

• » Amazon.com
• » Barnes & Noble


• » Borders.com
• » Indie Bookstores