Girl Guide

In a reflective mood: Author Lori Lansens. Photo Steve Carty.

In 2003, after years of lobbying doctors, Iranian sisters Ladan and Laleh Bijani, twins joined at the side of their heads, underwent a perilous, two-day-long surgery that separated them. At 29, they were the first adult conjoined twins to have the operation. Although many conjoined babies have been successfully separated, surgeons all over the world had refused the sisters, citing that adults’ brains simply don’t recover as well as babies’ brains. That would prove to be the case with Ladan and Laleh. Within 24 hours of separation, they were both dead because of massive blood loss. They had been aware of the significant risk — doctors had given them only a 50 per cent chance of survival — but they were determined to live independent lives. Though well adjusted to their extraordinary situation and highly accomplished (they could drive a car and both were attending law school), Laleh and Ladan had yearned to be separated for as long as they could remember. As intimate as two people could be, they longed, they said, to look into the other’s eyes.

That stunning, romantic idea seized author Lori Lansens as she spent several months of false starts on her second novel, the follow-up to her out-of-the-blue smash 2002 bestseller, Rush Home Road. After wrestling for too long with a lacklustre story about a bigamist, she took the advice of her agent and her husband and chucked the 129-page manuscript into the garbage. (“The last thing I am is a precious writer,” she says. “My muse is my computer’s ‘on’ switch. If there was anything good in that manuscript, it will come back in another form.”) The very next day, Lansens turned her creative energy to the “two girls who had been waving at me, trying to get my attention for months.”

The result, The Girls, is the surprising, unsentimental and moving story of Rose and Ruby Darlen, conjoined twins born in a small farming community near Chatham, Ont., in 1974. Written as a memoir in two voices as they approach their 30th birthday as the oldest living craniopagus (joined at the head) twins, Rose and Ruby recount their life stories: from being abandoned by their teenaged mother, to their adoption by their fiercely devoted Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash; from their reflections on their unusual circumstances to their more quotidian concerns, like Rose’s love of baseball and Ruby’s passion for archaeology.

Echoing the Bijani twins’ experiences, the novel opens with these compelling sentences: “I have never looked into my sister’s eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon. I’ve never used an airplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that.”

Courtesy Knopf Canada.

Like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Lansens nails the voices of outsiders, creating a world that is both strange and unfamiliar and yet instinctively feels real to the reader. Avoiding the easy trap of writing a Southern Ontario gothic about two grotesques, Lansens puts Rose and Ruby in the contemporary world of laptops and junk food. In a painful and crucial scene in which Rose and Ruby lose their virginity, Lansens nimbly avoids exploiting her characters, or playing up the shock value. It’s as real and as fumbling as anyone’s first time.

In person, Lansens — a successful Toronto screenwriter (South of Wawa) turned even more successful novelist — belies her self-assessment of a “quiet hermit of a writer.” She is blonde and buoyant, Hollywood toned and chicly dressed in head-to-toe black; she’s warm and instantly confiding. Twins, she says, have always held a fascination for her. “I loved the idea that identical twins are exactly alike, as well as different and distinct. And I loved the idea that twins have a kind of telepathy. Don’t we all wish we had that kind of connection with another person?”

To depict Rose and Ruby’s total interdependency — Ruby’s legs are not formed properly and Rose must carry her on her hip — Lansens researched the lives of other conjoined siblings, like Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins, and drew on her own experience of pregnancy, nursing and raising two pre-schoolers.

“Writing The Girls, I was breast-feeding my first child, and then I was pregnant and nursing my second. I had gone from being a writer who spent 10 hours a day alone with my computer to being a parent who was either holding a child, or nursing a child or sleeping with a child. I was never alone. Suddenly, I was constantly physically attached to another person in a vital way. Of course, it’s not the same thing as being conjoined, but that experience was my way in. My husband calls me a ‘method writer,’ and I lived that intimacy and dependency every day of writing. When I wrote Ruby, I could literally feel Rose beside me. When I wrote Rose, I could feel Ruby.”

Like Rush Home Road, The Girls is set in and around Lansens’s hometown of Chatham, where she grew up with her two brothers in a working-class family; her mother was a housewife and her father worked in an auto plant. The unassuming, blue-collar region has yielded surprisingly rich material. The area was a final destination for the Underground Railroad and that history inspired the fictional all-black town of Rusholme, the setting for Lansens’s first novel. She returned to the region for The Girls because in a small, contained, rural community, “Rose and Ruby may stand out and perhaps never fit it, but they would be familiar to everyone else. In a bigger city, I’d have constantly been dealing with astonishment over their appearance, instead of being able to get down deep into their lives.”

The proximity to Windsor and the U.S. border also clicked thematically for Lansens. “Anyone who grew up in a border town knows about the whole freaking American thing. You don’t really feel Canadian. You watch American television and root for American teams. When I moved to Toronto, it felt like I had finally moved to Canada. So for me, the setting resonated with Rose and Ruby’s experience. Two sister countries, alike but not, dependent on one another. Even the way Rose and Ruby are joined, at the side of the head – they have a panoramic view, but they are never looking at the same thing at the same time. To me, that feels a lot like the relationship between Canada and the U.S.”

Published in September, The Girls is already collecting rave reviews and word-of-mouth buzz and is being positioned like Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees or Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness: an ambitious literary novel that is also compulsively readable. Which makes the book’s absence from both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and Governor General’s Literary Awards lists all the more notable. But even about this, the ever-practical Lansens is sanguine.

“I was mildly and very briefly disappointed, but I don’t have time to dwell. This is my life: I write and I parent. And I’m so lucky and have so many blessings that I don’t want to waste one day or even one hour worrying about what I don’t have.”

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.