Twoness in Oneness: 26a by Diana Evans

Pretty red cover! Umbrellas and twins! Speaking of twins, have you ever considered the emotional complexities of growing up in twinhood? Come on, admit it: there was a set of identical twins in your elementary school and they were, like, famous, and you always wondered what it would be like to have an identical you. I know that in fifth grade I definitely used to spend quite a lot of my time staring at Matt and Graham F. in the cafeteria and straining my little brain trying to think about it as realistically as possible. And wasn't it fun being one of the few people who knew how to tell the twins apart? I was all, "That's Graham. Oh, I don't know why, I just KNOW. It's no big deal."

Georgia and Bessi are twins, obviously, and the novel introduces them in childhood. The title refers to their family's address - 26 Waifer Avenue - in London, where the sisters inhabit a loft with a "spaghetti-Western saloon door" and a pair of identical beanbag chairs that smell like strawberries and are used for problem-solving. The narrative is warmly funny, but it's also fresh and clever enough to prevent an overdose of preciousness. Gradually, though, some darker details of life at 26a Waifer Avenue are revealed. The girls' father often drinks and stomps around the house like Mr. Hyde, while their mom shuts herself up in the bedroom and has lengthy imagined conversations with her own absent Nigerian mother. At one point quite early on in the book, the family sits in the living room watching Charles and Diana's wedding on television. Georgia and Bessi are hoping that the romance and theatrics of it all might rekindle something between their parents, but are disappointed when their father's eyes deliver a cruel and ordinary domestic message for their mother: "Where the fuck is my pudding?"

The girls are more than just close or even co-dependent. They're connected. When one is sad, the other physically aches. At the onset of puberty, their barely-perceptable differences trouble them and they do all they can to remain physically identical. The gap widens during a trip to Nigeria when Georgia is attacked by a gardner and keeps it secret from her still-innocent sister. Early adulthood brings a whole new set of painful challenges as the girls crave the familiar comfort of "twoness in oneness," are terrified of being apart, but simulateously need to assert their individuality. While one twin strikes out on her own, the other's mood swings urge self-destruction and both suffer enormously, wishing that they could be one person.

Georgia and Bessi's story is about loss, but it's also about that pleasantly-suffocating, addictive, and all-consuming kind of love- not just between twins, but also as it exists between friends, lovers, or parents and children. It's about how the death of a person or of a relationship sharpens our peception of life. 26a deservedly won the Orange Award for New Writers in 2005.