Indivisible by Two by Nancy L. Segal

When I was little, I, like many girls, wished I had a little sister. As I got older, I came to appreciate having a big brother, and I’m fully convinced now that being a girl with a big brother is the best sibling permutation available... except for having a twin.

Wouldn’t it be the coolest to have an identical twin?! Imagine someone who shares your exact same genes… someone who you could do switcheroos with, share clothing with, and have some sort of cosmic mental connection that means a lifetime of non-verbal communication with your best friend. I so want to be a twin. Or one of a triplet! But the best I can do now is have twins. That would be so great. Yeah.

Because of my unreasonable fascination with all things twin, I grabbed the galley of Indivisible by Two by Nancy L. Segal when I saw it at BEA a few years ago. Then I read the entire book on the plane ride home. The publisher, Harvard University Press, has this to say about the book:

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 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. 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.

I can’t speak objectively about this book at all. I found the subject matter so fascinating that it didn’t matter whether it was “scientific” enough, or too anecdotal. I just wanted to read stories about twins, and that’s exactly what I got.

Indivisible by Two by Nancy L. Segal

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