Starred review from August 14, 2023
De Bres (Artful Truths), a philosophy professor at Wellesley College, explores in these stunning essays how “our intense reaction to twins... illuminates wider questions about what it means to be human.” In “Which One Are You?” de Bres contends that the tendency to sort twins into archetypal opposites—for example, the sun god Apollo and moon god Artemis of Greek mythology, or moral versus immoral twin story lines in literature, TV, and such movies as 1946’s A Stolen Life—is a subconscious attempt to manage anxieties about the “capacity to stably identify anyone,” which underlies all social interaction. “Twins in Wonderland” probes the social boundaries that “freaks” like twins violate, arguing that “we’re each only a car accident, a medical diagnosis, a same-sex crush... away from social failure,” while “Are You Two in Love?” explores how relationships that aren’t heterosexual and romantic are frequently coded as immature by Western society. In fluid prose, de Bres gracefully clarifies philosophical notions for the lay reader, and her own observations as an identical twin invigorate the book’s emotional center (“I am partly my body, I accept that now. But I’m also part of... a being whose boundaries stretch well beyond my skin, sometimes to the farthest reaches of the planet”) while leaving room for the many unsolved mysteries of identity, kinship, and closeness. This will challenge the way readers see the world.
October 1, 2023
An exploration of selfhood and twinship. Philosopher Helena de Bres, who describes herself as "an East Coast liberal arts college professor who grew up in a middle-class white New Zealand family with a union organizer dad and a hippie artsy mom," is also queer, disabled, and an identical twin to the illustrator, Julia. Twinship is central to a collection of engaging essays about binarization, identity, love, free will, objectification, and the depiction and understanding of twins in literature, art, philosophy, psychology, and popular culture. Identical twins, writes the author, are fascinating for singletons, in part because they "enflame broader anxieties about the fragility of everyone's capacity to stably identify anyone." From the time they were infants, she and Julia, like many identical twins, were identified by binary differences that reliably told them apart. Rather than feeling pigeonholed by the characterization, the author felt a sense of power from knowing "where my talents and resources lay." Nevertheless, as different as she feels from Julia's personality, she acknowledges that a twin faces a particular challenge in defining a sense of separate personhood. "The cognitive, active, and emotional connections between Julia and me--and between many other close duos--are significant enough to make that separation, at best, incomplete," she writes. Although Helena and Julia were born with a connective tissue disorder and both came out as gay in their 30s, the trajectory of their lives has diverged: Julia lives in New Zealand, raising a daughter; Helena became a U.S. citizen. Being a twin did not determine their lives, leading the author to ask, "what if a person isn't only something you are, but something you do?" Philosophizing about twins, she suggests, "can help unseat a crusty and constraining model of what it is to be a person." A thoughtful, well-rendered collection of musings on identity.
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