Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
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Who among us hasn't thought, on occasion, "I am not myself today."
Of course, if on these days we are not ourselves ... who are we then? Someone else, perhaps? Is there some other person that rises unbidden to the surface of our skin when the moon is full and the stars misaligned? Yes, I've seen the "good" me and the "bad" me, the "thoughtful" me and the "selfish" me. But how many more "me's" are there than meets the eye?
And while tangled in this existential line of inquiry, we may as well go ahead and ask the big one: "Who am I, any way?"
Now consider this: What if we didn't manifest our different persona through the simple subtleties of mood swings? And what if our multiple selves made themselves permanently present at the same time?
Welcome to Shelley Jackson's new novel "Half Life," a story about Nora and Blanche Olney, conjoined twins with two heads, two very different personalities and one inescapable body.
"Who am I," indeed.
In this, her first novel, Jackson has tremendous fun delivering to us an alternate vision of our own world -- a world in which a growing minority of people are being birthed onto this earth with two arms, two legs and two heads (all this thanks to nuclear testing run amok).
In this world so like our own, these conjoined twins -- known as "twofers" -- are a powerful minority with their own lobby groups, support groups and religious groups. They have their own film festivals and pride parades. A cottage industry of self-help books has sprouted around them: "Duality for Dummies" "Idiot's Guide to Self-Esteem for Siamese Twins," "Beating Yourself Up: Violence between Conjoined Twins," "My Conjoined Twin is an Alcoholic!"
As for Nora and Blanche, they live at twofer culture ground zero -- San Francisco, of course. Here in this binary-friendly city many "singletons" desperately wish they themselves had been born with duplicate heads (flying solo is ever so lonely, you see). And yet Nora, our narrator and the dominant twin, wants nothing to do with her own kind. She loathes the twofer life and longs to lose the superfluous skull on her shoulders. Sweet, docile Blanche doesn't have much to say on the topic. After all, she fell asleep 15 years earlier and never woke up.
As strange, unexplained things begin to happen, Nora gets the sneaking suspicion that her other half is starting to stir from her slumber and assert control. Something must be done to stop this invasion from within, Nora decides, and she hightails it to London seeking the help of Doctor Decapitate and the Unity Foundation -- a group that's all too happy to remove an unhappy twofer's redundant cabeza.
But as Nora closes in on her goal of singlehood, both she and the reader start to wonder which twin is actually running the show here. Sleeping Beauty Blanche may not be such a snooze after all.
Though this may be her big debut, Jackson, a former Seattle writer who now lives in Brooklyn, is not new to delivering funky and fantastical text to the world at large. She not only authored the short-story collection "The Melancholy of Anatomy" and the hypertext novel "Patchwork Girl," she's the author responsible for "Skin," a short story published exclusively in tattoos on the hides of some 3,000 volunteers.
In Jackson's nimble hands, this newest work is fierce, funny stuff. At turns haunting and hilarious, "Half Life" plays out largely as a first-person narrative that traverses Nora and Blanche's present as well as their past (the girls grew up in the Nevada desert not far from nuclear testing grounds and all too close to the cruel hands of people happy to label them a freak). But sprinkled throughout the story are sly little limericks and poems as well as chapters from "The Siamese Twin Reference Manual." These clever postings give us an intimate peek at twofer life -- from the specialty products marketed to them to the fetishes they fantasize about.
"Half Life" shares a certain kinship with Katherine Dunn's lovely literary freak show, "Geek Love," though Jackson's work is a more ambitious and contemplative read (be prepared to take your time as you swim through these viscous verbal depths). And it's in her ambitions that she both soars and sinks.
Her lovely prose is sticky with substance and surreal style. She writes, for example, " ... the gibbous moon goggled in the little window like a voyeur, and my hearts were pistoning in perfect synchrony." Yes, this kind of wily wordsmithing is a real treat. However, all treats are best served in moderation and some wordy over indulgences here eventually begin to weigh the movement of the story down.
That said, on the whole "Half Life" is an extraordinarily rich offering. Sexual identity, personal identity, national identity -- the lonely heart of the human condition gets deliciously disturbing and daring treatment. And what a treat it is to watch Jackson deftly use the Siamese twin's dilemmas as a reflecting glass for our own solo quandaries. After all, as the title of one chapter says: "We Are All Twofers."
Shelley Jackson discusses "Half Life" at 7:30 p.m, Saturday at The Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600.
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