A Life in Tandem: The Girls

By Breanne Boland June 1, 2006 Issue

Rose and Ruby Darlen have similarities and differences like any identical twins do. Rose is introverted and loves writing poetry and prose, although she gets excited and loud when cheering on her hometown sports teams. Ruby is more traditionally girly – she loves clothes and celebrity magazines and stories about love. Despite their differences in interests and demeanor, the two of them get along very well, which is fortunate. Their survival depends upon it, as they’ve been joined at the head since birth, and any attempts at surgical separation would kill them both.

Lori Lansens has written this story in the form of a fictional memoir, told mostly by Rose, but with the occasional interjected chapter by Ruby. Rose has always wanted to be a writer, and has the practiced and mannered voice of a person who has been striving toward that goal, but who feels self-conscious about her lack of education. Ruby comes along for the ride, adding chapters sporadically in her more confessional, passed-note style. She doesn’t share Rose’s compulsion to tell their story, but doesn’t want it out there without some say from her. Together, they tell the whole of a pair of connected lives, often overlapping in a way that’s funnier and more affecting than the usual he said-she said that comes from this type of storytelling. The characters didn’t share their writing as they were going through it, so Ruby often deflates Rose’s attempts at suspense and pacing (or denial), and the two frequently speculate about what the other is writing, often assuming the worst. While it would seem impossible for two people joined at the head to have any secrets from each other, this is not true of the Darlen twins. The reader discovers it in several hilarious ways, and a few that are incredibly sad and moving.

Ruby often tells Rose that no one will want to read the memoir of conjoined twins, but she is, of course, wrong. However, the people in the story who encourage Rose’s writing are also wrong, for different reasons. Ruby feels that people won’t want to read about something that they won’t relate to, but the more encouraging characters are imagining a salacious tell-all, the literary equivalent of a sideshow. Rose and Ruby’s story is neither — there are indeed plenty of details about the life of the world’s oldest surviving craniopagus twins, revelations of the careful research Lansens clearly undertook before writing this book. For instance, their joining makes them top-heavy, so certain activities, like swimming, are out of the question. Also, their house is filled with mirrors, so they can look at each other while talking. When they go somewhere without them, they feel lost and disconnected from each other.

However, the most moving parts of their lives are the ordinary parts, the domestic life and the normal problems and triumphs: their love for their adopted parents, their struggles with loneliness, their wary acceptance by the small Canadian town their family inhabits. Lansens does a great job constructing the surprising but necessary conventions of living a life in which you are never alone, the part of the book that satisfies curiosities about a unique way of living — the sideshow quotient. Still, it’s the normal parts of their lives, the losses and gains and successes and failures, that stand out through the book, and that stick around once it’s finished.

Unlike most novels written about conjoined twins, whether fictional or real, the protagonists of this novel are trying to lead a private life, as normally as possible. There are no sideshows, and aside from a flurry of publicity at their birth and the odd journalist calling, they keep their lives fairly circumscribed. This is part of what makes Ruby think the world wouldn’t be that interested in their stories, but really, it’s what makes it such a solid novel. Rather than depending on sensation, the quiet truth of typical lives and typical relationships are allowed to speak for them.

The Girls is a fictional memoir of a pair of intertwined lives by turns ordinary and extraordinary, a book that could have easily been sensationalized, particularly as its main characters are fictional and therefore entirely malleable. Instead, Lansens stood back and let the personalities of her leads dictate the story, just as any good novel of lives well lived would do. Rather than being a book about two people affected by a rare condition, their conjoining is just a rock thrown into the pond of their lives: the ripples from it are felt in everything, but it doesn’t define them. While Lansens’ background reading was quite good, this aspect of the book may be the truest of all.

The Girls, by Lori Lansens, Little, Brown, 343 pages, available at libraries and bookstores.

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