The difficulties faced by identical twins

Despite being a twin myself, I wasn’t necessarily disposed to love William Viney’s Twinkind, a book for which the phrase ‘lavishly illustrated’ might have been invented. Much writing on twins intended for the general reader (including recent fiction such as Brit Bennett’s bestselling The Vanishing Half) has been produced by non-twins, or writers who have twins in their family. The emphasis is often on how twins appear to the singleton majority, lazily depicting them either as freaks of nature or prodigies of psychic connection. Indeed, Twinkind’s visual component seems to be asking the reader to look at twins from the outside, while its title appears to encourage us to see twins as a species apart. It was refreshing, then, to find that Viney is an identical twin, and approaches twins from the experience of actually being one.

Split into three sections, ‘Myth and Legend’, ‘Science and Progress’ and ‘Spectacle and Prophecy’, the monograph is interspersed with a comprehensive and well curated selection of twin-related art and artefacts, from Yoruban wooden masks to Hollywood movie posters.