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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Author and philosophy professor Helena de Bres is a twin. In her new book, How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins, she writes in it, "Twins vividly breach some of the central physical, cognitive and emotional boundaries we assume hold between individual people. Thinking about their case can help us think about the more general human case with far-reaching implications." That is a much more thoughtful take than what we see in the media of twins as scams, switching places, or carbon copies of each other, or being polo opposites, the old evil twin trope.

The book has five chapters titled, Which One Are You? How Many of You Are There? Are You Two In Love? How Free are You? And What are You for? It also features illustration by Helena's twin sister Julia. Helena de Bres, welcome to All Of It.

Helena de Bres: Thanks, Alison. It's great to be here.

Alison Stewart: I love that your chapters are just questions, all the questions people ask. [laughs] Listeners who are twins or parents of twins, we want to hear from you. How would you describe your relationship with your twin? What role does playing a twin in your identity? How has being a twin ever affected friendships or your dating life? We want to hear about what you love or what's challenging about being a twin or parents of twins. You can call in as well. What is something you'd like people to know about raising twins? Have you approached your twins as a unit or as separate folks? Raising twins.

We'd like to hear from you as well. Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call in and join us on air, or you can text to us at that number. Our social media is available as well. Helena, why do you think philosophy is a good way to investigate the lives and the way people-- actually, not the lives of twins, the way people respond to twins?

Helena de Bres: Right. Well, partly it's just my own biography. I am an identical twin. I'm also a philosophy professor, so it's natural to bring those two things together for me. Although it didn't occur to me to do it until a few years ago, and I'm 45 now. It seems like a natural connection partly on the basis of those questions you just read out, the chapter titles. Twins are always being asked questions when they wander around in the world. We just attract attention everywhere from a very young age, and these philosophical questions are really on the surface.

You don't have to dig too deep into Twinhood to find some really perplexing issues to do with personal identity, the nature of love, free will. They come up in just normal conversation when you're a twin. I wanted to do a bit more of a systematic answer to them than I've been doing since I was about three years old.

Alison Stewart: Was it about three years old when you realized, "Wait a minute, my sibling situation is different than others?

Helena de Bres: I'm not quite sure. Identical twins started as the same thing. We're a fertilized egg that splits. The twin is there from the very beginning, and I don't really know when it is the consciousness of being one of two develops, but it's got to be super early on.

Alison Stewart: I do like very much how you make the distinction between identical and fraternal twins in your book. Would you share the language that you use, because I think it's actually, it's really helpful?

Helena de Bres: Yes. I prefer the terminology single egg and different egg twins. That's the biological way to approach it. Identical twins, as I just said, are the result of a fertilized egg that splits, whereas what we used to call fraternal twins or different egg twins come from two separate eggs. They share the same DNA as your average pair of siblings. They're not genetically identical. I like that better because I am an identical twin, but of course, I'm not completely identical to my sister. People will often ask, "Are you identical?" You'll say, "Yes," and then they'll look like they're being cheated. They're like, "But you don't look exactly the same." You can avoid that whole thing by just calling yourself a single egg twin.

Alison Stewart: Were you and your twin close growing up?

Helena de Bres: Yes, we've always been very close. We work very well together. We had a bunch of shared projects growing up. We just know a lot about each other's minds and preferences. We function very well as a unit and we love each other. We are the happy version of Twinhood. I know not all twinships are the same, and that's one of the points I like to make in the book, but we are the good story I guess.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some calls. Diane is calling in from South Orange, New Jersey. Hi Diane. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Diane: Well, thank you for taking my call. I told the screener that I'm a senior citizen twin, and both my sister and I are widowed. We do not live near each other. I live in New Jersey, she lives in Arizona. We did have a double wedding. My mother made sure that-- I met my husband in college and we introduced her to her husband, and we had a double wedding because our husbands were friends and we used to vacation together as couples. Now that we're both widowed, my sister and I take very nice vacations together.

Alison Stewart: Diane, thank you for calling in. We appreciate you sharing your story. You would talk about relationships in your book, Helena. "When the time comes, the idea goes, twins will and should shove aside their sweet little bonds so that the serious business of marriage and parenthood can take center stage. That's a nice tidy fix and no doubt many twins pull it off. Good for them. My own experience, one shared, I take it by many other twins, is off script. My husband was never a serious competition for Julia and none of her romantic partners were ever serious competition for me." How can being a twin be complicated when it comes to love?

Helena de Bres: I think that we have these opposing views of the twin relationship in the culture. You see them in popular culture and literature and film and just everyday life. On the one hand, we think of twinship as being the ideal relationship. It's a romantic vision. It's two halves are the same thing, perfect equality, companionship, unconditional love. It's a perfect version of romance in a way, even if it isn't romantic. Then the contrasting vision is of twinship as really a pathological union.

There are a lot of stories of twins becoming pathologically jealous of each other, violent, they often end in one killing the other one or killing themselves. There's a lot of drama built into that picture. I think those two images are really-- they don't reflect twinship itself, but singleton attitudes to twinship. There's something unusual, deviant, and alarming about our relationship at the same time as it being appealing.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Andrew from Montvale, New Jersey. Hi, Andrew. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Andrew: Hey, how are you guys? Thanks so much for having this segment. We're in Bergen County, New Jersey, go Jersey. We have 10-year-old identical twins, and they're awesome. It's fun, it's funny, but one of the first things people ask is "How do you tell them apart?" or "How do you know that one's the other one? Usually we use humor at first, and sometimes we'll tell people, "They're actually clones." Some people, believe it or not, we'll say, "Oh wait, that technology exists, or they can do that now?" I swear it's happened multiple times, but people always do want to know how you tell them apart and are they different?

The answer is, yes they are two different people. They are individuals, but having the same parents, the same upbringing, same schools, same friends, they share a common experience. I think with any siblings or people that are that close, there are many similarities but we have to remind people a lot that they are two individuals and they do have different feelings, different emotions, do have different experiences in life, as everybody does.

Alison Stewart: Andrew, thank you so much for calling in. Helena, why do people assume they're having the same experience? These two siblings are having the same experience?

Helena de Bres: This question of similarity and difference is just absolutely integral to the experience of being an identical twin. You feel like you're fighting against both ends of a pole, I guess. Twins are meant to be very similar. People are disappointed, we're failed twins if we are not similar enough, but there's also a lot of pressure for us to differentiate. There's a discomfort with us being too alike. I think that the business of being a twin is partly one of deflecting these attitudes from singletons that we need to be close, but not too close, similar but not too similar.

It's a constant dance for us. I do think that many twins just are very alike. Part of what I talk about in the book is that we don't need to be so troubled by that. There's something a bit ideologically charged about this ansistance that twins be individuals. I think there's something a bit suspect about that, and it's worth questioning.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Dee calling in from Yonkers. Dee, thanks for calling All Of It.

Dee: Thank you for having me. My role is as a parent of nine-year-old fraternal twins, and I made a very cautious decision to not raise them under the twin identity. They know that they're twins and they do have a twin identity, but for instance, they don't know who's born first and who's born last, because my twin cousins, of which I have several, have always had a dominant, submissive relationship based on who's oldest and who's youngest. Mine don't know and as a result, they switch the inherent roles that come between who's older and who's younger, just based on what day it is. They switch between individual identity as well as twin them just as quickly. So far, so good with that. Let's see what happens when we get to teenage years but it's been good raising them that way.

Alison Stewart: So interesting Dee, thank you for calling in. You address birth order and what we assign to birth order.

Helena de Bres: It's really interesting, the first question you get as a twin is, "Are you identical?" Everyone privileges the identicals. We're the higher class of twins so everyone wants to know if you're identical. The second question is often who was born first. We tend to invest this really strong significance into that fact. I've never really understood it. The idea that the one who comes out first is dominant is not universally shared across cultures. There's another take on it, which is that the dominant twin shoves out the first one as a scout. The one who comes out first is really the one who's being used by the more dominant one. There's different ways of understanding it but birth order is really privileged by parents of twins and people who run into twins.

I think it's part of this general desire to somehow work out a way to stably differentiate these very similar beings when they're infants. We're all desperate. It's a panic move to find some way of making them distinct enough to identify.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Helena de Bres, philosophy professor at Wellesley College. Her book is called How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins. Our call-out is for people who are twins and people who are the parents of twins. For the twins, how would you describe your relationship with your twin? What role does being a twin play in your identity? Has being a twin ever affected your friendships or your dating life? Give us a call, 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call in and join us on air or you can text us at that number. Also parents of twins, how are you going about raising your twins? We'd love to hear your stories as well. 212-433-9692, you can text to us or join us on air.

You write about conjoined twins. Even though they share one body they all see themselves as two different people. What does this challenge? What notions does this challenge?

Helena de Bres: I think we all, at least in Western cultures, tend to go through life with this assumption that bodies line up one-to-one with people, so if you have two bodies, you've got two people or if you have one body, you have a single person. One of the trippy things about conjoined twins is that they violate that assumption. They very much seem to themselves and to their parents and associates, like two individuals. If they've got two heads, they have quite distinct personalities, but they're sharing a body so that one-to-one correlation isn't there. Thinking about that case started getting me thinking about whether we could also say that a single person could be spread across two bodies. One of the chapters in the book is about that question, is it possible for twins in separate bodies to somehow share personhood or function as a single person at least part of the time?

Alison Stewart: Someone who couldn't stay on the line, but had a question had a set of twin kids boy and girl. Is that experience different from same-sex twins? Do same-sex twins have a closer bond? It seems so.

Helena de Bres: I'm not sure of the research on that. I was always told as a twin that female identical twins were the closest in the camp but I don't know if that's true. One thing I want to emphasize in the book is that twinships are really individual. There's no one common experience of being a twin. I'm inclined to think that gender isn't going to be the most significant dividing line, or at least there's going to be a diversity of experiences between different sex and same-sex twins.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting that you said that of course, there's no one kind of twinhood experience, yet the way singletons respond to twins tends to fall in certain silos. Is that media? Is that exposure? Why do you think that is? I listed off a couple of the tropes.

Helena de Bres: Part of it, I think is that it's a general move, a kind of othering move that a majority group will pull on any kind of minority. Twins aren't a political minority, we're not oppressed but we are a numerical minority. We're rare in the human population. I think in general, there's a tendency for the larger group to homogenize the smaller group. They're different by contrast to the majority and so the difference seems the most dominant thing and there's not that much attention to diversity within the group.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Margaret from the Upper West Side. Hi, Margaret. Thanks for calling All of It.

Margaret: Thank you for taking my call, as people always say.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] You're on the air.

Margaret: What would you like me to speak about?

Alison Stewart: You have an identical twin is that right?

Margaret: Yes. I'm 81 years old. I have an identical twin sister and then my parents had eight children and there were two other sets of twins, both fraternal and then two singles.

Alison Stewart: Did your parents treat you as twins differently than the other children?

Margaret: Not that I remember. I think they were just overwhelmed. I don't remember that we were treated differently. Certainly, the fact that my twin and I are identical and the other two sets were fraternal, I don't think made a difference. The fraternal twins, I think are more different in personality from one another than my twin sister and I were.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting within that one family. Helena, did you want to respond before the break?

Helena de Bres: Yes. I want to reach out to the fraternal, the different egg twins, they often feel that they as I said earlier, are substandard. The French actually call different egg twins [French language] as if they're somehow fakes. [chuckles] I actually think that part of our obsessive focus and identicals is our tendency to really prioritize the superficial aspects of twinhood, which is the physical similarities and the cute quirks. Whereas what's really essential to being a twin, if you are a twin is the relationship between twins and nonidentical twins grow up next to each other instead of just like identical twins do. In many ways, it's actually a very similar experience, but I think maybe you need to feel it from the inside to recognize that.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Helena de Bres. The name of the book is How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins. We'll take more of your calls. We have several parents of twins on the line. We have twins on the line. We'll have a conversation, we'll learn a little bit more about the Minnesota study of twins reared apart and maybe we'll talk about Julia a little bit, your twin after the break.

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You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, my guest is Helena de Bres. She's a philosophy professor at Wellesley College. She's also a twin, and she's written a book called How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins. Let's take a few calls. It looks like Sheila, from Cos Cob Connecticut. Hi, Sheila.

Sheila: Hi, I love this subject. It's fascinating to be the mother of twins and I have the distinction of also being the grandmother of identical twin boys and twin sons. I had a daughter first and when she was almost three, had a premature son and it's been just a fabulous experience. I would say that the way you know you're successful as a parent of twins is if they love each other when they're adults and even though there are conflicts along the way, you've managed to eliminate a lot of the competitiveness and they support each other and love each other.

My daughter is bringing up her twin sons similarly. She dresses them in red and blue the way we did so that they can have their own identity. People know or at least they have a hint of who's who, and can call them by name. When she was about three when they were born, we went out and there was always such a fuss made over them that I asked her if it bothered her that people made such a fuss over the twins and she went into the litany of every common question. Are they identical? What are their names? How old are they? Do you dress them alike? All of the questions. She just went through it the way an adult would. It was really, really fascinating.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. Helena, do you get a sense of why people feel like they can ask those kind of questions of twins and their families? [laugh]. It seems rather intrusive to me.

Helena de Bres: Yes. My father said that for a while there they were thinking of just printing something out and gluing it to the stroller with answers to the top five questions. [laughs] I talk in the book about how there's an interesting parallel between people's attitudes to twins in this way and their attitudes to women, especially attractive young women. When they go down the street they're often also accosted by questions and comments. There's a similar objectification of twins and women, an obsessive focus on their similarities, and a tendency to ask these invasive questions, use twins, or use women for the purposes of others. It's an interesting parallel.

There's something my twin likes to call Twintersectionality here which is when you have twins who are themselves, attractive young women, their tendency is magnified further. They really get so much attention and a lot of it feels ethically off.

Alison Stewart: Wow. Let's talk to Marilyn, calling in from West Orange, New Jersey. Hi Marilyn, thanks for calling All Of It. Hi.

Marilyn: Hi. Can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: Yes, you're on the air.

Marilyn: Okay, thank you. I am an identical twin. We call each other womb mates. We were very close. My son married an identical twin, and her response when she found out he was the son of a twin was he gets the twin thing. As a matter of fact, when he got married, my sister and I escorted him down the aisle because my husband is no longer here. He requested that. Being the son of twins seems to be a special relationship. Now, my sister is now the great-grandmother of identical twin boys. We're both just thrilled with it. Just thrilled with it.

Alison Stewart: Marilyn, thank you for calling in. What is the twin thing? From your position as a philosophy professor, what is the twin thing?

Helena de Bres: I don't know if I can exactly define it but I'm feeling it at the moment with various events and interviews to do with the book. I'm running into so many twins. Twins will turn up and we'll have this connection. It's an unusual status to have. It is a minority, but it's not a political minority. We don't get together but sometimes parents or twins will go to twin conventions, but when you're an adult twin it's actually pretty rare to run into other twins, especially fellow identical twins. I feel like I've found my people and there's that connection that you have when say you run into someone from your hometown or someone who shares some other really central part of your identity. Yes, I get it and I think it's lovely.

Alison Stewart: A text says, "Hi Allison. Hi Helena. I am the dad to boy-girl twins. Both my daughter and my son state they remember being in their mother's womb together. I tend to believe them." This goes back to this and whether it's [unintelligible 00:23:02] or not that twins have their own language, that twins communicate in a way that other siblings don't communicate. Did you find this in your own life? Did you find this in any of your research while you were working on the book?

Helena de Bres: Yes, I'm no scientist so I can't really pronounce on when exactly it is that twins recognize each other. I did read something from a twin specialist that said it was very unlikely that in the womb the fetuses can conceive of each other as distinct humans. There is some evidence that they're very careful. They often will reach out and touch each other, and they're very careful not to touch each other in the eye region. Their movements suggest that they're recognizing someone who's delicate and human right from that beginning moment. That's very cool. I can't remember the first time that I recognized Julia. She's just been there from the very beginning. We haven't had any experiences. I've not had experience of telepathic communication with her but she claims she's had some in relation to me. I'm the flatfooted non metaphysically sophisticated twin, I guess [laughs].

Alison Stewart: Although you tell a story about you both having an eye rash at the same time and you are deciding like, "Were we always predestined to have this eye rash at exactly the same time?" Tell us a little bit why you included that story and what were the bigger-picture issues you were trying to address with the eye rash story.

Helena de Bres: The natural interpretation there is that we had some shared virus that one of us caught off the other but neither of us had had this rash before ever in our 40-something years. We had it developed the same day. Even if that case in particular maybe wasn't in the end that mysterious, it set off this train of thought which I think is very common with twins and those who observe twins, about the extent to which our experiences and our actions are just determined by biological features outside our control. The thought was, "Oh, maybe this eye rash was somehow programmed into us 42 years ago when our egg split. More generally there is this question about whether humans are able to step outside their biological inheritance and truly act freely.

Twins have been used for over 100 years now to investigate that question scientifically. Same genes, different outcomes, same genes, same outcomes. If you do studies on twins you can generate results that apply to humans in general on that question.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Leah from Manhattan. Hi Leah, thanks for calling All Of It.

Leah: Hi, thanks for taking my call. First off, I wanted to sympathize with what you were talking about the female twin objectification. I'm not a twin but as soon as you said that I can't tell you how many times I've gone out with friends of a similar stature with a similar haircut, and guys will say, "Oh, hi, are you sisters?" That's a thing that happens even when you're not a twin. It's a weird idealization. I have much younger brothers who are fraternal twins so I've witnessed them growing up from afar. I know they're not single-egg but it always seemed to me like they're two sides of one coin because they're different in every way physically, emotionally, their interests.

One is tall, brown hair, brown eyes, musical, artistic, outgoing. Other one is short, blonde hair, blue eyes, scientific, mathematical, withdrawn. I just thought it was so interesting and I've always wondered how much of that is biological and how much of it is their conscious decisions to exert their own identities.

Alison Stewart: You talk about free will in the book, Helena.

Helena de Bres: I do, and I also talk about that habit or that sense that many twins fall into two separate camps along some personality spectrum. Often in stories of twins, they're binarised. There'll be a good twin and evil twin, or a quiet twin and a loud twin, a sporty twin, and a nerd. We had this tendency to either treat twins as exactly similar or to treat them as binary opposites which was something that certainly came up in my own twinship. I am an identical twin, but I was always characterized as the quiet one, the introvert, and my sister Julia as being the loud assertive extrovert. Part of what I do in the book is talk about why we do that, what the benefits of doing that are, and also ask the steeper question about how we should feel about our sense of self once we recognize that it's the result of the social process of sorting us into a camp in relation to someone else.

Alison Stewart: Someone wrote, "My father's a fraternal twin. He has a twin sister and as a policy, the public school he attended separated them starting in kindergarten. The way that he characterized it is that they were very close up until that point. I always thought it was an odd policy and in fact, to this day they aren't very close now. I'm not sure if this contributed, but possibly."

Helena de Bres: No, I find that really sad. Maybe it did. There was certainly a period-- I'm not a parent so I haven't experienced it from the parent end. There was a period in the 1980s and 70s where there was a huge emphasis on splitting twins up, making sure that they individuated as you might say for their own good. My parents resisted that. They really let us take the lead there. We weren't split up. We had distinct friend groups of our own accord but we didn't feel that we were being forced to separate early and I'm glad about that. I do think that there's a lot of anxiety about where the twins can really function as non-pathological humans if they're too close later on. My own sense as a twin is that you can be very, very close to your twin and nonetheless be a perfectly functional individual.

In fact, that's a lesson that singletons can learn from twins, that you can be deeply intimately attached to someone else, define your identity partly in relation to them, and still be a fully-fledged functional mentally healthy person. It's a lesson I think we need to learn.

Alison Stewart: Let's finish out with Robbie from Queens. Hi, Robbie. You give the last word.

Robbie: Hello. Okay, I'm an identical twin. I'm an artist here on the East Coast and my identical twin brother is a rocket scientist working for NASA. We chose not to compete.

Helena de Bres: I love it.

Alison Stewart: [laugh] Robbie, thank you so much for calling in. Thanks to everybody who called in those who got on the air, and those who didn't as well as folks who texted. The book is called How to Be Multiple; The Philosophy of Twins, by Helena de Bres. Thank you so much for taking calls with our listeners, Helena.

Helena de Bres: Thank you, Alison. That was super fun.

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