My book group recently read Lori Lansens’ novel The Girls about sisters in Canada who are conjoined twins. We were all a little hesitant to tackle it and not sure we’d be able to get past the subject matter to get to the characters and story, but Lansen’s writing made that concern a moot point, and we all loved it. It wasn’t sentimental, or prurient; the sisters came across as vivid characters who just happened to have an unusual set of life challenges (albeit life-defining ones). Our book group had one of its liveliest discussions ever, most of which centered on the dilemmas of the characters, but some of which focused on what it would be like to be a conjoined twin.
It made me start nosing around to see if there were other novels featuring conjoined twins, besides the several fictionalized accounts of the lives of Chang and Eng, the conjoined twins from Thailand (Siam) whose fame led to the term “Siamese” twin. (Two good novels about those twins are Chang and Eng by Darin Strauss and God’s Fool by Mark Slouka.) I thought finding conjoined fiction would be a tall order, but there was a lot to choose from!
For starters, there are two stories by Mark Twain: “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins” (1869) and “Those Extraordinary Twins” (1892). Ellery Queen wrote The Siamese Twin Mystery in 1933, in which one (but which one?) of the twins is a murder suspect. For a more modern twist, Judith Rossman’s Attachments has two California divorcees marrying conjoined twin brothers in the 1960s, and Andrew Beierle’s First Person Plural features conjoined twin brothers sharing a torso who must negotiate the fact that one of them is gay and the other straight. In Love Will Tear Us Apart by Tara McCarthy, the conjoined twin sisters are pop singers, and one of them is nursing a secret ambition to record a solo album. The stunning Geek Love by Katherine Dunn features conjoined twin sisters Electra and Iphigenia.
But I think my next conjoined twin reading will be Half Life by Shelley Jackson, which features an imaginary world in which conjoined twins (known as “twofers”) are common and have a subculture complete with its own vocabulary. Nora doesn’t really fit in; her twin Blanche has been sleeping for more than 15 years. Nora goes to London to try to be released from the dead weight of her sister, but various events intervene. Jackson is known for her experimental fiction (a recent work of hers was written in hypertext) so the twists and turns this book takes are sure to be unexpected. Powell’s Bookstore review says: ” In the tradition of Middlesex and Geek Love comes a stylish, fascinating, and sometimes disturbing first novel about one Siamese twin’s plot to kill the other, written by a spectacularly cool and well-connected author. ” ~ Ann G.
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