Twin: A Memoir

Twin: A Memoir

by Allen Shawn
Twin: A Memoir

Twin: A Memoir

by Allen Shawn

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Overview

A heartbreaking yet deeply hopeful memoir about life as a twin in the face of autism.

When Allen Shawn and his twin sister, Mary, were two, Mary began exhibiting signs of what would be diagnosed many years later as autism. Understanding Mary and making her life a happy one appeared to be impossible for the Shawns. At the age of eight, with almost no warning, her parents sent Mary to a residential treatment center. She never lived at home again.

Fifty years later, as he probed the sources of his anxieties in Wish I Could Be There, Shawn realized that his fate was inextricably linked to his sister's, and that their natures were far from being different.

Twin highlights the difficulties American families coping with autism faced in the 1950s. Shawn also examines the secrets and family dramas as his father, William, became editor of The New Yorker. Twin reconstructs a parallel narrative for the two siblings, who experienced such divergent fates yet shared talents and proclivities. Wrenching, honest, understated, and poetic, Twin is at heart about the mystery of being inextricably bonded to someone who can never be truly understood.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781101475225
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 12/30/2010
Sold by: Penguin Group
Format: eBook
Pages: 240
File size: 214 KB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Allen Shawn is the author of the critically acclaimed Wish I Could Be There and Arnold Schoenberg's Journey. He is a composer and pianist, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Magazine and other publications. He lives in Vermont and is on the faculty of Bennington College.

Table of Contents

1 Lost 1

2 July 200s 11

3 Together 39

4 Summer 62

5 Things Not Seen 78

6 Cracks Between The Keys 93

7 Dislocations 104

8 Binary Stars 128

9 Finding Words 152

10 Autism 170

11 At Briarcliff 207

Acknowledgments 223

Index 227

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