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Journal Entry 1 by Antheras from Waterloo, Ontario Canada on Friday, February 22, 2008
 Books in Canada:
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.
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Journal Entry 2 by Antheras from Waterloo, Ontario Canada on Sunday, March 02, 2008
My Review:
Rose and Ruby Darlen, like any sisters, can be each other’s best friend or worst enemy. Born during a tornado, “The Girls”, as they’ve been dubbed by the residents of their small Southern Ontario town, share a different life than most sisters. Craniopagus twins (joined at the head - they share a skull bone and blood supply), they were abandoned at birth by a desperate teenage mother and raised by Aunt Lovey (the nurse who helped bring them into the world) and Uncle Stash.
Rose has independent motion but her face is pulled to one side and her limbs are no longer perfectly proportioned due to carrying Ruby on her hip since she was a toddler. Ruby, while dependent on her sister for mobility, has the perfect face and beauty both would have shared if not born conjoined. Determined to beat the odds and provide her girls with a life of value, Aunt Lovey pushes them from infancy toward independence. Now 29 years old, The Girls have lived much longer than the doctors predicted and, with their 30th birthday approaching, Rose decides to write the story of her life, convincing the reluctant Ruby to do the same.
Told in the alternating voices of Rose and Ruby, Lori Lansens’ The Girls is a haunting novel. The voices of The Girls are unique and their viewpoints on events fascinating. Rose, as the aspiring writer, initially composes the majority of the chapters but as the novel progresses, Ruby relates more of her own thoughts and memories.
The sisters can’t see each other without the aid of a mirror and so each writes their chapters in isolation, with the intention of reading the other’s work after it is finished. The most fascinating aspect of The Girls is the assumptions each makes about what the other related and how that dictates what each in turn shares with the reader. What is most illuminating is what each chooses not to share. Rose portrays herself as the more reliable narrator, speaking to her readers in a serious, methodical tone while Ruby’s contributions are breezy. Their accounts of the same events often contradict and the reader is left to ferret out the truth.
In the end, it is the reader’s own assumptions and reflexive reaction of pity for The Girls which is destroyed. Rose and Ruby are so much more than objects of pity, but to discuss much more of this special novel would be to give away too many of its secrets - ones readers should discover for themselves.
Sending to someone who requested it via BookMooch.com.
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The Girls
