The Silent Twins: Now a major motion picture starring Letitia Wright

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The most common theory was that Jennifer, the younger by ten minutes and widely considered the less intelligent, was controlling her sister. I think all the characters at some point say ‘Huh’ at the end of a sentence when they are talking to someone, used to get more information out of them such as 'what did you do that for, huh'? Full of irony and contradictions, but i definitely expected a more surreal and bizarre book than this which is very readable, empathetic, and mature. Wright (“Black Panther”) and Tamara Lawrance (“Kindred”) star in “The Silent Twins,” the stranger-than-fiction story of the Gibbons twins; they play a grown June and Jennifer in director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s telling of their perplexing life story, adapted from Wallace’s book. Through interviews and the twins' diaries, novels, poems, and short stories, the author tries to understand who these young women were.

If you like strange literature with an equally strange backstory, this is most definitely a book you should seek out and read. Parents with identical twins have an extra burden of child-raising to encourage socialization with peers – look what happened here when these twins were not forced to be normal!

Another unusual thing I remember is that when characters referred to the time they would say ‘5 past of 10’ instead of 5 minutes past 10’. Quirky non-conformists crushed by the racial mores of 1960s Britain and the institutional system or demented psychopaths bent on manipulating their family for their own personal pleasure?

According to Wallace, the girls had a longstanding agreement that if one died, the other must begin to speak and live a normal life. The analysis is easy: feeling ill-equipped to communicate directly with others using their voices, the girls poured themselves into their art in hopes the world would see its merit and reach an arm back to them. In Gibbons’ hands, an awkward pause becomes an “elaborate silence,” and his teacher’s breasts are “cloche-shaped. Almost entirely inwardly focused, these jealous and possessive silent sisters each wrote novels, poetry, memoirs and scores of diaries, trying to outdo the other in literary output and merit, while refusing to speak to or acknowledge the world around them.The parents could not believe the twins committed the crimes, denied this, but how could they not know? The smallest boy kicks it the furthest, causing the last bit of liquid within to dribble onto the street. Though not mentioned in the narrative, they were bullied by their classmates for being the only Black children in the school (and possibly in the whole of Wales at the time). I think we all are facinated by the secret lives and languages of twins, how they seem to have a bond that transends mere sibling connections.