Women Talking: Twin Talk

unpacking identity with Helena de Bres

That’s me, on the right. Annie, on the left.

For those who don’t know, I have an identical twin. Her name is Annie and she lives 15 minutes away from me here in California. Having an identical twin is one of the more unusual things about me. It has impacted me in a multitude of ways that I am just starting to unpack. 

I’ve only talked about what it means to be a twin on this Substack once. (Paying subscribers got to read an excerpt of my twin chapter from my book in October 2022). In this post, I wrote about how being a twin primed me for co-dependency, and to shut down access to my own preferences. It taught me that it was easier to cede authority to others, to let their wishes take precedence, to just go along, accommodate, keep the peace. This pattern followed me into my marriage (and also likely made me good at my career as a ghostwriter). But upon turning 40, the pandemic, and quitting my job, I began to realize that I was tired of being silent. This Substack is part of my desire to stop swallowing all my words.

Now, my sister didn’t silence me! No one knows how to navigate the world with another person always at their side. Our parents did their best. They did not dress us alike. They ensured we were placed in separate classrooms. But we still spent most of our childhood together. Even now, you do not want to play a game like Taboo with us. We share a lifetime of memories thus there is always something to reference. Recently, over the holidays, we walked into a Nike store. ”What do Nike stores always make you think of?” Annie asked me. “Chicago,” I said immediately. 

This is both cool and also sometimes disorienting. 

“Sometimes being a twin felt like living with another version of yourself… Maybe she was only quiet because Desiree was not. Maybe they’d spent their lives together modulating each other, making up for what the other lacked. Like how at their father’s funeral, Stella barely spoke, and when someone asked her a question, Desiree answered instead. At first, it unnerved Stella, a person speaking to her and Desiree responding. Like throwing her own voice. But soon she felt comfortable disappearing. You could say nothing, and in your nothingness, feel free.”

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

Today is our birthday. See, even there, in the words of that sentence, are the seeds of what makes being a twin so strange. Whenever people ask what I want to do for my birthday, I always have to caveat and say: “I don’t know. Let me check with my sister.” Because it isn’t really MY birthday, it’s OURS. I’ve always had to triangulate between what I want and factoring in her opinion. I then carried this tendency into every other relationship in my life.

There aren’t a ton of books about the experience of twindom. I’ve read Christa Paravanni’s Her, about the death of her twin, and books about twins who were separated at birth being reunited (Somewhere Sisters and Identical Strangers). I’ve read both of Joan Friedman’s books, The Same But Different, and Twins in Session. I have devoured the writing Jean Garnett has done about being a twin, and consequently learned about her twin sister, Callie. Both are editors (the New York Times recently profiled them!). (If you haven’t read Jean’s work, read her twin work There I Almost Am in The Yale Review and Giving Away My Twin in The New Yorker. Also don’t miss Scenes from an Open Marriage in The Paris Review).

It was thanks to Callie that I received an advance galley of How to Be Multiple by identical twin Helena de Bres in which she unpacks the philosophy of twins. The book is the best interrogation about the experience that I’ve read yet. Helena and I, despite growing up on separate continents, are from the same generation thus I loved her reference to the Sweet Valley Twins book series and being asked the question: Are you Elizabeth or Jessica? (I think both my sister and I had Elizabeth tendencies… quiet, good girls, rule followers). She explores the many strange aspects of being a twin in the book, from having a shadow self out in the world, to the fact that having a twin can be even more intimate than your most intimate relationship as well as what happens when twins struggle to individuate from their twin. (She includes research that suggests that “identical twins are less likely to marry than singletons are: a quarter of monozygotic males and nearly a half of monozygotic female stay single for life.” This is a shocking statistic.)

Individuation is something I write about in my book - how I struggled to individuate from my sister, and my husband, from my family of origin, and even now, from my kids. Enmeshed seems to be my most comfortable state (understandable given that I wasn’t alone even in the womb) but that doesn’t mean it is what is most healthy for me.

My sister and I on a Facetime where we realized we were wearing almost the exact same thing (white shirt, tortoise shell glasses, gold hoops)

Helena was kind enough to answer my questions about being a twin below. I hope that Twin Talk can become a series. I’d love to have

Joanna Goddard

on (read her cute interview with her sister Lucy here!) Also

Emily Nagoski

who wrote Burnout with her twin sister Amelia. Maybe I should interview my sister!

Enjoy!

“Lucid, curious, and deeply felt, How to Be Multiple is a work of philosophy, an autobiography of twindom, and a captivating exploration of selfhood.”

Melissa Febos

A conversation with Helena de Bres:

Are you identical or fraternal?

Identical.

What is your favorite thing about being a twin?

Having a life-time best buddy who I can count on at any moment for fun, love and support. Schmaltzy but true! 

What’s your least favorite aspect of twindom?

All of the singleton stereotypes, anxieties, desires and projections about twins that we twins have to deal with from day one. Non-twins either idealize twins, as having the best possible human relationship—one of perfect equality, fidelity and unconditional love—or they pathologize us, treating us as creepy, codependent, envious and violent. In reality, twinships are like any other human relationship, in being a mix of good and bad. It’s annoying having to deal with all this baggage, and the predictable and not very clever insinuations and jokes that come along with it.

Did you play tricks on people growing up?

No. Although, looking back now, it’s clear to me we looked very similar, we didn’t think we could pull it off. I think we also didn’t want to participate in what is essentially a singleton fantasy about twins. I might be over-generalizing from my own case, but twin switcheroos seem to me to be a thing non-twins obsess over, not something that most twins are particularly interested in doing.

Did you ever date the same person?

We once had a crush on the same person. (Since you’re wondering, he chose my sister!) I haven’t got the stats on this, but I feel like twins dating the same person is probably super rare. In my experience, both potential friends and potential romantic partners tend to “pick a twin” pretty early on and don’t shift.

What do you wish more people knew about twins?

What I most wish singletons knew is something about their own reactions to twins, not about twins themselves. I believe that a lot of singleton responses to twins are based on a set of questionable ideological commitments—about what it is to be a normal human, or in a normal human relationship. I wish singletons recognized this about themselves, because it might cause them to question those commitments, in a way that would benefit them as well as the twins they interact with. (I have much more to say about this in my book!)

How do you celebrate your birthdays? 

We live in different countries, 18 hours by plane from each other, so we rarely celebrate them in the same place. But we do always call each other on the phone, and if we happen to be physically together we’ll go out for breakfast and ostentatiously open our double haul of gifts in a café.

Were you similar or different? Do you think you inadvertently altered your personality to differentiate yourself from your twin?

We were physically very similar as kids, less so now. There are lots of things we’ve always had in common that go beyond our appearances—intellectual and artistic interests, a quirky sense of humor, a concern for social justice and a love of animals and swimming. We’re both professors now. The most obvious difference between us is that my sister is more extroverted than I am. We may have amped that distinction up as kids as a means of forging our individual identities, yes, and we’ve noticed that it’s become less well marked as we’ve both gotten older. I’ve become more outgoing and my sister has become more introverted. The difference is still there, though. When I’m visiting my sister, after a few days she’ll look at me with concern and ask “Are you getting introverted-out, Lena? Do you need some alone time?” I’ll take the helpful hint and head to my cave and she’ll go out with a friend and come back glowing.

Did you struggle making room for your twin in your marriage (if you married)? Do you think being a twin makes you hard to be married to?

This wasn’t an active problem for me during my marriage, since I lived in a different country (and hemisphere!) from my sister, so there wasn’t generally free time she was taking up that my husband didn’t get. I’m sure that in other twinships tensions sometimes arise, but I think that part of the problem here is that, as a culture, we assume they will. Most of us are taught from a young age that the healthy and proper way to live as an adult is to center your life on a (usually straight) romantic partnership, which doesn’t leave much room for a close relationship with your adult twin. I think we’d all be better off having a broader, more open and accommodating understanding of what a valuable set of adult relationships looks like. Why think you have to choose between your spouse and your twin? Why not both?

Any weird twin-tuition? Do you ever show up to the same place wearing the exact same outfit?

I don’t believe in twin ESP, but I do believe that twins have a very intimate understanding of each other’s minds, due to their shared biological and environmental inheritance, which can result in some pretty trippy things. I often have a very good idea of what Julia is thinking or feeling. We’ve had different clothing choices for years, but several times we’ve bought each other exactly the same gift. Once you’ve found the perfect thing, how nice to get given it yourself!

Helena and her twin Julia on their most recent visit (Helena is on the left)

Thank you Helena for being willing to be my inaugural interview for Twin Talk. Buy her book here or follow her on Instagram here.

You can read an excerpt of the book in The Los Angeles Review of Books here.

Read the most recent review in The New Yorker here.

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My work is published in print ON PAPER for the very first time. An essay I wrote called The Murky Middle is included in an anthology in celebration of

Literary Mama

and their 20th anniversary. You can order it here.