The Twin Stands Alone

Multiple Madness
From the celebrated triplets of yesteryear to the miraculous octuplets of today

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.