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."
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