Of Twins, Monsters, and the Duality Within Us

According to science, I am the product of an as-yet unexplained phenomenon. Two bodies. One origin. Diverging lives. That alone is worth writing about.

It’s the curious case of identical twins: one fertilized egg that suddenly splits, producing two human beings with the same DNA. It’s a biological event scientists still don’t fully understand. But culturally? People think they’ve got twins figured out.

Every time someone finds out I’m one half of this arrangement, they ask the same question: “Wow. What’s it like to have a twin?”

The question is sincere, but the expectations behind it usually come from pop culture—which has a surprisingly limited imagination when it comes to twins. You’ve seen the familiar versions: seductive twins, creepy twins, sinister twins, or the inevitable third-act reveal that solves the mystery.

It was the twin all along.

As storytelling devices go, it’s a pretty tired toolkit. And to me, it misses the most interesting part entirely. The real story of identical twins isn’t deception or gimmicks. It’s identity.

Imagine starting life sharing a womb with another human being. From the moment you arrive, comparisons begin.

Lauren walked first.
Lindsay talked first.
Lauren looks more like her mom.
Lindsay’s the dramatic one.

Even well-meaning adults do it without realizing it. They’re trying to categorize two nearly identical faces the way someone might sort puzzle pieces.

And whenever someone sees one of you, they ask: “Where’s your sister?”

It’s an innocent question, but it carries a strange implication: that you’re not quite complete without the other half present. Kids pick up on that dynamic quickly. And like most people struggling to figure out who they are, twins often respond the same way. By trying very hard to be different.

For my sister and me, that process initially looked like a lot of screaming and hair-pulling. Twins, like most siblings, are exceptionally good at pushing each other’s buttons. But the tension between us was always layered with something deeper. Because we also knew each other extraordinarily well.

We shared the same childhood memories, the same private family history. We knew each other’s insecurities, embarrassing moments, and worst mistakes. That kind of familiarity can be dangerous when you’re young. But it can also be incredibly valuable when you’re writing a novel.

The central characters in My Twin the Murderer are identical twins who no longer know or trust each other. One is a neuroscientist who believes in data and rationality. The other is a volatile writer and addict with a messy past. When a murder occurs and the twins’ identical DNA appears at the crime scene, the question becomes simple: Which twin is telling the truth?

To clear their names, they’re forced into an uneasy alliance—one that leads them into the shadows of a secret government program, the psychedelic underground, and ultimately, smack dab in the center of a looming catastrophe. While drafting those scenes, I often found myself thinking about my own relationship with Lauren. How deeply we as twins can understand each other, and how easily that understanding can turn into friction.

I also did something many writers hesitate to do. I showed my sister the early drafts.

Lauren reads differently than anyone else in my life. She’s an award-winning screenwriter, which means she’s reading the pages differently than most. She knows when a reaction rings false, when a piece of dialogue doesn’t feel authentic. Her feedback shaped the book in ways I didn’t initially expect.

Some of the sharpest moments between the fictional sisters grew out of conversations Lauren and I had about our own childhood; the competition, the fierce loyalty, the quiet resentments that can simmer beneath both. We also talked about how we each carried the grief of losing our father when we were young, and how differently we processed it. Those conversations reshaped parts of the story and eventually became a key emotional thread in the novel.

At a certain point, writing the relationship stopped feeling like invention and started feeling more like truth.

Writing this novel taught me something about fiction I hadn’t fully appreciated when I began: The most compelling stories rarely come from tidy ideas, but from contradictions.

At first, the premise felt straightforward. Identical twins. A murder. The uncertainty of shared DNA. But the deeper I went into the draft, the more I realized the story wasn’t really about solving a crime. It was about identity. About how fragile it can be, and how much of it exists in tension with itself.

Each of us carries contradictions—compassion alongside cruelty, loyalty tangled with resentment, courage shadowed by fear. The longer I worked on the novel, the more those tensions began shaping the characters and the plot.

Once I leaned into that complexity, the story opened up. The novel became less about answering the question of who committed the crime and more about exploring who these people really were. What did they believe about themselves? What were they capable of when pushed far enough? And how well can anyone truly know another person—even someone who shares their face?

Fiction, at its best, gives us a way to investigate those questions safely. It lets us follow characters into uncomfortable territory and sit with truths that are harder to confront in everyday life. For me, writing this book became an exercise in acknowledging that identity is never singular. We are shaped by memory, experience, and by the people who know us best.

Sometimes those people are the ones who see the darkness most clearly. And sometimes they’re the ones who force us to face it.

This novel is for anyone who has ever been fascinated—or unsettled—by the idea of people born as two.

But mostly, it’s for Lauren.

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