Twice as funny, twice as sad
Examining the pain and pleasure of being twins
As a twin, Diana Evans knew that multiple births generally skip a generation. Still, when she found out she was pregnant and went for her first ultrasound, the question “ How many?” was foremost on her mind.
“ I was desperately hoping I wouldn’t have twins and that’s the first thing I wanted to know, ‘ Is there one or two?’ ” said the young British author, who was in Toronto this week to promote her debut novel,
Much to her relief, she learned she was carrying just one infant, a daughter, now nine months old.
“ First of all, I couldn’t imagine having two babies at once because that would be too much work,” she said. “ But also it would just be weird, that’s the issue. It’s weird being a twin, you know. For twins to have twins is almost too much for one person to take.”
“ Weird” is a curious word to describe the twin experience, but that’s exactly what Evans takes on in 26a, which earned high critical praise in the U. K. this year, taking the Orange Award for New Writers. The book has also inspired hasty comparisons to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.
The “26a” of the title refers to the loft bedroom that twins Georgia and Bessi share at 26 Waifer Avenue in the suburb of Neasden in north London.
The girls reside in the flat with two sisters, their quiet and beautiful Nigerian mother, Ida, and their father, Aubrey, an Englishman from Derbyshire.
But it’s the loft where the twins spend much of their time, their differences apparent to them but invisible to outsiders. “ They were the same, like dolls,” Evans writes. “ They were twoness in oneness.”
“ I get the ‘ twoness in oneness’ question all the time,” Evans said.
“People ask me to dissect that phrase and I find it impossible. I find it difficult to answer questions such as ‘ What’s it like to be a twin?’ because it took me a whole book, pages and pages to come to understand it.”
Surely, though, it’s Evans’ own fault that reporters exhaust her with questions about twinhood, as her book piques curiosity with its often funny and painful depiction of an extremely close relationship.
But Evans knows about aloneness, too. She became a “lone” twin in her 20s when her sister, who suffered from depression, committed suicide in 1998.
Her novel, while not a blueprint of her life and family, was inspired by that monumental loss.
Given her background, it’s only natural that we want to know more, and Evans, generously, tries to explain.
“ At one point in the book, Georgia said that being a twin is a bit like being in love. But it’s also more than that in the sense it’s unconditional. Some people would say it’s like that bond between a mother and a child.
“ It’s like this person you’ve been in the womb with, who you experienced pre- life with, and you face the world together as two people, so it’s very, very intense.
“ It means the world you share is much bigger than it would have been otherwise because it’s like you’re experiencing everything twice. When something happens you react to it doubly. Things are twice as funny, twice as scary, twice as happy. Do you know what I mean? It’s very difficult to explain.”
Less difficult to articulate is why comparisons to other authors, or labelling 26a as a “black” novel, or generalizations about the multicultural experience in London, are beside the point.
“I just yawn,” said Evans, who knows a bit about the shortcuts journalists take, having worked as one herself in England.
“ It’s kind of lazy and shortsighted. I get the Zadie Smith comparison so much, but I’m totally used to it.
“ Obviously, I’ve read lots of black writers over the years and I’ve been involved in that world, so I was really aware that there has been so much writing about racism and multiculturalism and I felt it had been done to death and I wasn’t really interested in that part of the story. It was just by the by.”
A year after her sister died, Evans knew she wanted to write about it. Unhappy with her first draft, which she wrote while completing a master’s degree in the prestigious creative-writing program at the University of East Anglia, she essentially began again from scratch, vowing to herself to finish the book by the end of the course.
“ At the time, I thought, God, why am I doing this? I’m starting again. But that was the only way I could do it.”
Added to the pain of rewriting was the difficulty depicting Georgia’s depression.
“ At one point,” she recalled, “ Georgia starts seeing cockroaches on the walls around her and there were moments where I thought I could see cockroaches on the carpet.
“I was completely inside Georgia’s head, so that was probably the hardest bit for me to write because it was extremely dark.”
Though the loss of her sister is unlikely to leave her, Evans is in a lighter place now.
Once the publicity tour for
is over, she is looking forward to leaving behind discussions of twins to explore other subjects.
That said, she does realize, in light of the fact that twins tend to skip a generation, that her daughter could one day be faced with them.
“ And I would tell her to enjoy it and let them enjoy it, too.”