Sexual orientation is still a big deal, still a difficult and divisive issue in our society. Fag and faggot are still easy insults in homes, schoolyards and factories, and 'that's so gay' synonymous with 'that's so lame.' Despite the legal and social strides made in the past fifty years, the realization of being gay still has the power to throw people into crisis. Coming out can feel like jumping off a cliff. Many people, young and not so young, still risk losing family and friends in the process. Many still simply leave everything and everyone behind. What if one member of your immediate family was impossible to leave behind, no matter what his reaction to your coming out? What if he was quite literally stuck to your side? That is precisely the case for Owen, the narrator of First Person Plural, Andrew Beierle's powerful and well-imagined novel about the complicated lives of conjoined twins, one straight, one gay.
Owen and Porter, the protagonists of his story, are conjoined twins of the dicephalus (Latin, two-headed) variety. As Owen succinctly puts it in the opening chapter, they “have two heads, attached to two necks, and a single torso with separate spines fused at the pelvis.” They have, in a single rib cage, “three lungs, two gall bladders, two stomachs, and two hearts.” One controls, and feels, the right side of the body, the other the left. In common, aside from much of their body, is an extraordinary handsomeness. In terms of personality—behaviour, thinking, predilections — they could hardly be more different. One could almost say they are opposites. One, to use simple gendered categories, could be described as a jock, the other a nerd. One is straight, the other discovers he is gay. Did I mention the one body part they share equally? The mass of nerve endings they feel equally? Ah, never mind.
First Person Plural is Andrew Beierle's second novel. His first, The Winter of Our Discotheque, has been described as a book for 'rainbow beach bags', or light, campy gay fiction employing all the tricks of a soap opera. First Person Plural, though written in simple, straight-forward, unpretentious prose, is not light reading. While not devoid of humour, this second novel betrays much serious research and reflection. Indeed, in “Freaks 'R' Us: Inhabiting Alien Characters,” a recent guest blog entry on Bookseller Chick, Beierle talks about something probably on the minds of most readers of his novel. What did he do to allow himself so fully into the world, into the most intimate and private lives, of such 'freaks'? The answer, not surprisingly, is that he not only did a certain amount of research on conjoined twins in particular, and twins generally, but that more importantly perhaps, he spent five years deeply immersed in thinking about all manner of things from his own life, and imagining what those things would be like for his characters.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!
2 - Frank Riela
My partner and I recently read "First Person Plural" by Andrew Beierle. We had picked it up in a bookstore on a recent trip to Palm Springs, California, where we were visiting friends. I thought it would be light "airplane reading", perfect for the trip back home (to Italy). What I found in reading it was instead a study on one's sense of identity and and the feeling of "otherness" experienced by many minorities. Beierle never made me feel I was reading about "freaks". I never found myself thinking of Owen (the narrator) and Porter (his brother) as anything other than two young guys in a unique situation finding their way in the world, in life and in love, in the way that we all do. I couldn't help but think that we are all "other" in some sense, and most of us struggle with identity along the way too. Perhaps the only difference between Ownen and Porter and ourselves, is that our "otherness" is beneath, as opposed to on, the surface. I highly recommend this excellent novel.