What To Read

Finally, a new book captures the unique experience of twinhood, which continues to grow globally to historic highs. In her unique new book, How to be Multiple, philosopher Helena de Bres uses the curious experience of being a twin as a lens for reconsidering our place in the world, accompanied by illustrations from her identical twin Julia. In this review, Tertulia contributor (and twin) Anne Hellman shares her personal reflections on the book.

Of the many famous illustrations in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, one that likely jumps to mind is that of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum locked together side by side, arms over shoulders, warily examining Alice as she leans in for a closer look. The image appears on the first page of Helena de Bres’s brilliant new book of essays, How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins (Bloomsbury), and it is the only illustration in the book not created by de Bres’s identical twin sister, Julia. Alice looks at Dee and Dum in the way that most singletons look at twins: with curiosity tilting toward fascination. The excellent question de Bres asks here is: What are the twins thinking?

“Much of the experience of twinhood is determined not by twinhood itself but the response of non-twins to it,” de Bres writes in her introduction, “Twins in Wonderland.” And she is the ideal author to flip this paradigm on its head, as both a “single-egg” twin (aka “identical twin”) and a professor of philosophy at Wellesley College. 

As a single-egg twin myself, I immediately appreciated this clarification, since throughout my life I’ve been surprised by how few people know what “identical twin” means exactly. Monozygotic twins come from one egg that splits in two, resulting in two people with identical genomes. Regardless of whether a twin is identical or fraternal, the closeness born out of growing up in-step with another person—and in the single-egg case, with a person who looks almost exactly like you—offers the perfect framework in which to reexamine some of the biggest existential problems of our time. 

De Bres homes in on five such problems, cleverly titling each essay with a question commonly asked of twins: “Which One Are You?”; “How Many of You Are There?”; “Are You Two in Love?”; “How Free Are You?”; and “What Are You For?” 

Reading How to Be Multiple as an identical twin inspired the sweetest combination of vindication and “Aha!” moments, I think because the beautifully written passages interlace philosophical analysis, personal storytelling, and a third, essential element that is rarely present: the twin mind. Julia’s voice comes in from time to time (of course it does!) and these passages are as poignant as they are funny.

Twinship raises a pivotal question, one which de Bres told me she finds particularly captivating: the question of personhood. Where can we locate it, exactly? Is it in the body, in the mind—or is it somewhere else?

In “How Many of You Are There?” de Bres first confronts the old way of thinking, that “he” or “she” exists inside “his” or “her” little bubble of skin—the body. Today, the conventional answer is that personhood exists in the mind. But de Bres turns to an even older way of locating the self, one which feminist theory has upheld: that personhood is grounded in social connection. Bringing in her own disability (she and Julia have a type of osteogenesis imperfecta), de Bres unpacks how that condition has both shaped their bodies, minds, and social connections as well as revealed the impossibility of living as a completely independent individual. “What if this idea that personhood requires closely guarded separateness from others was wrong all along?” she asks. 

This made me think of the habit I have whenever I talk about myself as a young girl. I very rarely use “I.” The pronoun that roles off my tongue is “we,” even if the memory doesn’t specifically include Karen. Up through high school, we were rarely without each other. Not only were we identified as “the Hellman twins” by others, but we identified ourselves as “us,” as “we.” If you were to ask the ten-year-old me where I thought that “me” was, I probably would have pointed to Karen. 

I found de Bres’s discussion of binarization, in “Which One Are You?”, especially illuminating. We all, whether we are identical twins or not, inflict binarization on others, whether it’s Good Twin v. Evil Twin or nice person v. mean; Quiet Twin v. Outgoing Twin or introvert v. extrovert; normal v. abnormal—twins are always abnormal to singletons, but what about to themselves? And then, we turn that same behavior of categorization inward.

“When I consider the messy history of my beliefs about what my own self is like, I don’t seem to have any reason to trust them,” de Bres posits. “Is my authentic self actually something quite different from the one I detect in operation today: Is some other, truer, primitive Helena lurking in the depths?”

About a month ago, I spent a week with my twin in London, where she now lives. For seven days straight, we were nearly inseparable, like we used to be; we did everything together. We sensed the double-takes on the Tube, in the park, in the museums. But the crazy thing is, by the end of the week, even though Karen and I have lived far apart for more than half our lives, I became certain that she and I were moving as one, from one room to the next, to the bathroom and back, that her seat on the couch was interchangeable with mine. In essence, I caught a glimpse of what it was like when we were little, when I felt as one with her, that not only did my own separate self not exist, it never had existed.

De Bres told me she wrote this book with two audiences in mind: singletons and twins. For singletons, she hopes the illuminations about personhood, about free will, about love and queerness, feminism and objectification, will offer a way to view all of us as connected in some way or another, a path that could lead to social justice and, dare I say, equality? For twins, she offers one of the first accurate portrayals of twinship in modern literature, a way of seeing ourselves not as freaks and not simply as petri dishes for Nature versus Nurture debates, but as real live human beings who have all the mess and blurred lines of singletons, we’ve just been put into boxes our whole lives.

But that is just the point. We all have been put into boxes our whole lives. By others and by ourselves. De Bres, in this concise, intellectually pervasive, and humanly embracing book, shows us how we might think and feel our way out of this. We might live better for it. 

“I see my vision of a more expansive way of living turning from a two-person refuge into a world that fits all of us. I’m temperamentally allergic to utopias, but I guess I can sign up for one if it starts innocently with Julia and me, arthritic and in cardigans, in a vintage house by the sea. You can back into a revolution this way, as we all can when we run into a pair of twins and allow ourselves to see their relationship for what it is, rather than for what it resembles, or for what we desire and fear it to be.”

Anne Hellman is a Brooklyn-based writer whose fiction and essays have appeared in Catapult among other publications. She is the founder of The Grandmother Project and a writing mentor for Girls Write Now.