The Girls (Hardcover)

In 29 years, Rose Darlen has never spent a moment apart from her twin sister, Ruby. She has never gone for a solitary walk or had a private conversation. Yet, in all that time, she has never once looked into Ruby's eyes. Joined at the head, "The Girls" (as they are known in their small Ontario town) are the world's oldest surviving craniopagus twins. In her astonishing second novel, Lori Lansens (author of Rush Home Road) ventures into the strange world of physical abnormality that Barbara Gowdy so chillingly explored in We So Seldom Look on Love. While some writers might be tempted to play up the grotesque aspects of life as a conjoined twin, Lansens treats her so-called freaks with sensitivity and respect. The result is an extraordinarily moving narrative about human connectedness that questions the very meaning of "normal."

The Girls is a fictional autobiography of the Darlen twins, mostly told by Rose but with occasional chapters by Ruby. The stronger and more frustrated of the two, Rose longs to become a published writer but tends to conceal or distort disturbing incidents from their shared past. Ruby, by contrast, tells it like it is, but is much more accepting of their intertwined fate. (Ruby is also the prettier twin, and one of the most poignant and shocking scenes in the novel is Rose's account of her--or rather their--first sexual experience.) As Rose and Ruby describe their relatively sheltered childhood, rocky adolescence, and tentative experiments with love, the interplay between these two distinct voices heightens the dramatic tension of what's to come. The saddest part is saying good-bye--to "The Girls" and to this compassionately written novel. --Lisa Alward

Lori Lansens’s The Girls is the fictional autobiography of the world’s “oldest surviving craniopagus twins.” Rose and Ruby Darlen, born in the blacked-out aftermath of a tornado, are joined at the head; they share a common blood supply and can never be separated. Abandoned by their birth mother, they are quickly adopted by a delighted nurse, Lovey Darlen and her husband Stash. As their thirtieth birthday approaches, the bookish Rose decides to make good on a fifteen-year-old promise and write her life story. She waspishly invites her “somewhat lazy” sister Ruby to write a few chapters as well, though they agree not to read each others’ work. The result is a captivating, tender story of identity, attachment, and love.
As she did in Rush Home Road, Lansens draws fragile, irresistible characters. The girls’ fiercely devoted Aunt Lovey teaches her daughters self-reliance and gratitude; Uncle Stash, her husband, is a gentle butcher of few but fervent words and a compulsive photographer; and the wraithlike Cathy Merkel, who helps deliver the girls, is a study in grief.
Some characters exist only as fascinating absences. For years, Rose and Ruby take turns pretending Larry Merkel, a four-year-old swept away by the tornado on the girls’ birth date and never found, is their boyfriend. The girls’ birth mother, a panicky teenager who gives her name as Elizabeth Taylor before wobbling off the scene, is a potent absence too. Throughout their lives, Rose and Ruby recast and embroider the meagre information they have about her-reaching entirely different conclusions. Later, another Taylor, an oddly conceived infant, is the object of endless wistful speculation.
And the girls themselves: what remarkable voices they have! Rose addresses us as though we are anthropologists. Her tone is earnest, stoic, and wry; we get the sense that she doesn’t hold out great hope for Ruby’s contributions. She has an urgent and ambitious plan to set down the essential facts of her life at the rate of four pages per day. She considers at length which events to include, and frets about structure and style. But Rose is a romantic too, a poet whose rhymes occasionally steal into her prose.
In contrast, Ruby is chatty, unpretentious, and endearingly honest about herself (“I don’t really like to learn. I just like to know.”). More outgoing than her scholarly sister, she relies on an intuitive knowledge of her twin. Watching Rose read, she says, “She’s frowning, which means she loves it.” Ruby has her own pursuits. She believes she is at least as well known for her discovery of Neutral Indian artifacts as she is for being a conjoined twin. Ever the optimist, she actually plans a surprise birthday party for her sister. Many of the book’s funniest moments reside in the difference between Rose and Ruby’s recollection of the same events.
The girls’ lives are often as odd as their appearance. Significant events-birth, courtship, family trips, deaths and burials-unfold as variations on the the girls’ own kind of strangeness . Denied baptism by the local priest, for instance, the girls prevail on a visiting nine-year-old boy to baptize them in the creek, and end up nearly drowning. Other landmark moments are equally bizarre, although no one really seems to notice. Rose says, “The strangest thing about strange things is that they’re only strange when you hear about them or imagine them or think about them later, but never when you’re living them. (I believe I can speak about that with some authority.)” Nothing develops as we might expect. But it is our primary reaction-automatic pity-which takes the biggest beating. Far from requiring or appreciating pity, Ruby and Rose feel blessed. “Ruby and I endure because of our connectedness. Maybe we all do. How can that be a curse?”
The use of two first-person narrators is fascinating. Physically they are one traveller; these two have lived the same life, and yet they haven’t. Rose and Ruby make different choices about what to tell us. Each predicts, often incorrectly, what the other might have already said. And where their accounts do cover the same territory, they conflict. Many details are manufactured or borrowed from Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash. (Aunt Lovey concedes that she has made up much of the story about how she and Stash met, using what she knows about Stash’s personality.) Like any two people, Rose and Ruby negotiate and report the world differently. Their interests, affections, appetites-all are distinct. In fact, their physical connection actually means that they can never see the same things at the same time. They have only ever glimpsed one another in photos, or in the numerous mirrors hung for that purpose. As Rose notes, their story is “combed by memory and set by imagination.” Their conjoinment proves misleading-their dual points of view seem to offer half, not twice, the certainty. Despite their shared circumstances, we can’t know the whole truth about the girls, or the people around them.
Beyond physical attachment is devotion; throughout, love is a deep, sustained note. Aunt Lovey is enchanted by the girls from the moment she sets eyes on them, and resolves to keep them. When Stash feebly opposes her, saying that they are attached, she retorts, “They’re attached to me.” Aunt Lovey and Stash express their deep connection through almost wordless tenderness, murmuring “You” to one another. Their neighbour, Nick, has no facility for conventional good behaviour, but his inarticulate devotion to the girls is invaluable to them, and redemptive for him. Though they are often disgruntled with one another, the girls, too, have small, private gestures that telegraph their love for one another. Rose and Ruby’s relationship calls on an exquisite understanding of conflict and compromise. This intimate connection accompanies them even into their separate dreams.
Though we may approach The Girls with the curiosity of carnival-goers, what’s behind the curtain is not the spectacle we expected. Ruby and Rose Darlen are sisters, unutterably dear to one another, who happen to be conjoined. The interesting fact of their conjoinment is ultimately upstaged by a truth that has two faces: first, that love is the “common blood supply” that binds us to our dear ones through attachments seen and unseen; second, that sometimes the physical “truth” is beside the point. The Girls is beautifully rendered, a wonderful, funny, heartbreaking tale.
Nancy Fischer (Books in Canada)