The Girls, again

As it turns out, The Girls is not exactly as I thought it was.

The girls are conjoined twins and they are about to die because, well, conjoined twins do not live all that long and because one of them has an aneurysm that is about to end her life which means the other will die, too, by bleeding to death.

Being conjoined means of course that there is literally a shadow, a friend for life, the "other" who we are truly attached to -- but what this wonderful book shows is that as close as two people can be, it is impossible still to know one another.

The twins remember things differently though clearly they both witnessed the exact same thing; they protect each other from truths deemed to painful; they are often annoyed with one another. But most surprisingly, though they share every single thing, they don't know each other terribly well.

So, on a fundamental level, we are each utterly alone. No matter how attached we believe ourselves to be.