“...examines the complex relationship between the practical and the passionate self, the realist and the dreamer, and the importance of those moments in life that make you feel 'airborne.'”
—Erin Kodicek
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Oct 2009
26th
Confessing for Two
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.
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