Identical Strangers: A Memoir That Reads Like Specfic

Last summer, I went to see Three Identical Strangers, a documentary about identical triplets who were separated at birth and adopted into three different families. There’s a little summary of this story in one of the ESL readers at school, a fun story about college-age boys discovering identical triplets, but the full story is a lot darker. The babies weren’t split up by accident, instead they were part of a secret sociological study on genetically identical babies raised in different homes. The data is sealed until 2066, and none of the researchers are talking, but it’s kind of implied that the triplets had a predisposition to depression, and the researchers wanted to see how different parenting styles in different socio-economical classes would affect that.  

There were some other multiples who’d been separated through the same shady adoption agency/secret study and later found each other, including twins Paula and Elyse.  (There are probably also other twins who’ve never found each other.) Paula and Elyse wrote a memoir about their experiences, Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunites. 

I knew the book would have a reasonably happy ending, since the sisters had enough to share to fill a book, and they obviously liked each other enough to complete a creative project together.

But the twin study is even darker in Identical Strangers. I mean, the part about people growing up without knowing their twin, or even that they had a twin, is already pretty dark. Elyse and Paula discover that their birth mother was mentally ill, and was even institutionalized while pregnant. In the documentary, it’s implied that the birth parents may gave been mentally unstable, but in this memoir, it’s completely clear.  The birth mothers were all mentally ill, and it seems like the twin research was really on how much parenting and life experiences can affect a genetic predisposition for mental illness. How much can nurture compensate for nature? Are we doomed to our genetics?

The birth mothers (and adoptive parents) were all Jewish, too.  I already feel like we, as Jews, have a cultural predisposition to depression and anxiety. This Atlantic article about inheriting intergenerational trauma really resonates with me: 

“Well, like all Ashkenazi Jews, you have a lot of intergenerational trauma. You know, because of everything that’s … happened.”

Of course you’re anxious, she seems to say; you’re Jewish!

When legitimate researchers study inherited trauma, it must be difficult to prove what comes from genetics (or epigenetics, I think?) and what comes from being raised by traumatized parents. This seems to be the central question of the twin study’s research, although, again, all of the data is sealed for decades, and no one at the adoption agency would tell Elyse and Paula the whole story. The sisters struggle with this question of what they’ve inherited too, and it’s never really resolved.

This doesn’t feel like a memoir, more like a dark scifi setting, with unwitting subjects of sinister mental experiments trying to discover what was done to them. Pregnant women with mental illness were needed for this “study”. I wonder if the adoption agency, that lied to adoptive families and to separated twins, really obtained consent from mentally ill mothers or just pressured women with mental instability into giving up their children.