Identity, Identicality, and Life Writing: Telling (The Silent) Twins Apart

Identical twins challenge the Western valorization of the individual, and thus the major life-writing genres, autobiography and biography. The intense bond between Jennifer and June Gibbons, and their elective mutism, made their biography an unlikely project, but their obsessive journal-writing documented their lives in great detail. Marjorie Wallace's The Silent Twins demonstrates--and surmounts--the difficulty of representing identical twins.