A leading expert on twins delves into the stories behind her research to reveal the profound joys and real-life traumas of twelve remarkable sets of twins, triplets, and quadruplets.
Indivisible by Two introduces us to an assortment of memorable characters, from the “Fireman Twins”—brothers who, though reared separately, are astonishingly similar in personality and behavioral traits—to the twin sisters who overcame one twin’s infertility by having the other serve as her surrogate mother. We meet one of the few identical brother–sister pairs in the world after one of two sisters was surgically transformed into a man, and identical triplet brothers, only one of whom is gay while the others are straight. We see uniquely blended families—identical twin brothers marrying identical twin sisters, and Chinese twins adopted by different Canadian families yet raised as sisters.
Being a twin can also render the experience of historical tragedy uniquely painful. We meet Stepha and Annetta, survivors of Josef Mengele’s heinous experiments in Auschwitz, and untangle the troubled lifelong tie between Jack and Oskar, born in the 1930s to a Jewish father and a German Gentile mother, one raised as a Jew in Trinidad and the other as a Catholic and a member of the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany.
Nancy Segal unravels these stories and others with an eye for the challenges that life as a twin (or triplet or quadruplet) can pose to parents, friends, and spouses, as well as the twins themselves. These moving stories remind us how incompletely any theory explains real life—twin or not.
Nancy L. Segal is Distinguished Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I. Separated at Birth
1. Beer Cans and Key Rings
2. Switched at Birth
3. Oskar and Jack
Part II. Variations on Common Themes
4 Selectively Mute
5. Straight, Gay, and Straight
6. Agnes to Andru
Part III. Extraordinary Circumstances
7 Two Bodies and One Soul
8. Twin Towers
9. A Good-News Story
Part IV. Everyday Wonders
10. Selfless Love
11. Marital Math
12. Quad Boys Are Fine...
Afterword
Notes
Acknowledgments
What People are Saying About This
People have always thought that as twin athletes we were unique. Now, having read Nancy Segal's book, we're amazed at how many other twins can be so alike and so different at the same time. Indivisible by Two was a great read!
Paul and Morgan Hamm
People have always thought that as twin athletes we were unique. Now, having read Nancy Segal's book, we're amazed at how many other twins can be so alike and so different at the same time. Indivisible by Two was a great read! Paul and Morgan Hamm, Olympic gymnasts
Steven Pinker
A gripping collection of vignettes on an eternally fascinating phenomenon. Indivisible By Two is a wonderful book for its scientific implications, its human interest, and its literary quality. Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works, and The Language Instinct
Irving Gottesman
What E. O. Wilson did for ants, Nancy Segal has done for twins. . . . She has the ability to reach out and communicate with an infectious enthusiasm to both young minds and seasoned scientists. Irving Gottesman, Irving and Dorothy Bernstein Professor in Adult Psychiatry, University of Minnesota Medical School