Nancy Segal’s work, herself one of a twin, has
taken her many places, in search of lives that do not cleanly reduce by two. 
Identical twins, as we know, actually are not that equivalent, one is so often
a runt, and even the uterine environs are not exactly equal.  None of this is
really relevant to this book, apart from a story of twins raised apart.  This
book focuses on the stories of twins, triplets and quads, with variations on a
theme.  There are:

• Twin boys who were raised apart, but both swig beer in
  quantities, both are fireman, both are obese, they meet up, one gets
  married, there is a tension between them
• There are twin girls, who land up in the hands of Dr
  Mengele, but survive, although attempts were made to forcibly mate them
  with twin boys in the camps, and Segal glosses over the gory details a bit
  to preserve these cute grandmothers who still happily live in each other’s
  kitchens when they visit
• And it had to happen: twin boys born to a Jewish father,
  who are split up, one raised as a Jew, one raised in Germany as a Catholic in the Hitler Youth; one later goes on the Israeli Navy, one as a student in
  post-war Germany
• What about identical brothers and sisters? Not impossible,
  in this world of gender reassignment surgery, and that is in this book too,
  as Agnes becomes Andru, marries Audrey, who now sees what her husband
  looks like when he was Agnes
• What about triplet brothers, where one of them is, well,
  gay, and there is multiple sclerosis in there as well…
• We all know twins who married twins, and so does Segal,
  and this story is here too: do they have twin kids? Read the book. What I
  will say is that the men would not swap wives despite the identical looks
• As New York lost her twin buildings, so did one 40 year
  old lose her twin, this story breaks her as well, leaving surviving twins
  understandably using the metaphor of mutual collapse following such
  devastation and violence; there may have been more than forty others!
• Chinese twins raised by separate families, as … sisters. 
  That is here too
• There are the silent sisters, both of whom develop selective
  mutism, Melanie worse than Mira
• And there are quads, one with cerebral palsy
• There are twin women, one who can conceive, one who can’t,
  so …

Segal is a professor and serious
researcher, so this book is a sidebar to her serious work.  The book avoids any
serious debate, it is only for entertainment, but she writes as a professional
researcher, tight and economical, without making any real foray in the
nature/nurture arguments, which I suppose are genotype/phenotype arguments now
largely passed on by as resolved, although as Segal notes, laboratory studies
miss out on the richness of the lives of multiple births.

This brevity detracts from the book
though, the stories are annotations, not rich and expansive sagas as many
stories would warrant. This is unfortunate, as for instance with the Mengele
twins, and Oskar and his brother, history has woven astonishing backdrops for
these stories.

However, if it’s a quick fix of
unusual stories, without the Ripley’s believe it or not capacity to dress up a
story, it’s a sweet confectionary, well and tightly written, with the bare,
unobtrusive insights of a professional.

© 2006 Roy Sugarman

Roy Sugarman, Ph.D., Conjoint
Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry University of New South Wales; Director of
Clinical and Neuropsychological Services, The Brain Resource Company

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