One and the Same: My Life As an Identical Twin and What I’ve Learned About Everyone’s Struggle to Be Singular

The author of Stars of David and a twin herself, journalist Abigail Pogrebin offers a poignant and personal look at what it's really like to live with your mirror image and tells the story of many twins who struggle to balance intimacy and individuality.

Writer. Mother. Wife. New Yorker. Abigail Pogrebin is many things, but the one that has defined her most profoundly is “identical twin.” Pogrebin's relationship with her sister, both as children, when they were inseparable, and today, when she longs for that uncomplicated intimacy, inspired her to examine the phenomenon of twinship—to learn how other identical pairs regard their doubleness and what experts are learning about how DNA impacts our sense of identity and shapes our lives.

In One and the Same, Pogrebin presents a tapestry of twinship, weaving science reporting and personal memoir with the revelatory stories of other twins, such as two sisters who stopped speaking for three years; football stars Tiki and Ronde Barber, who admit their twinship comes before their marriages; a pair of bawdy, self-proclaimed “twin ambassadors” who have created a media empire around their twinness; and brothers whose shared genetic anomaly wrought unspeakable tragedy. In this stirring account, Pogrebin shows how living identical is both a celebration of sameness and a struggle for singularity that defines us all.


From the Hardcover edition.