How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins by Helena de Bres—Annotations
My highlights (as an identical twin) from this clearly written philosophical musing on twins tying together existential questions of free will, relationships, etc,.
Published January 19, 2025



Book: How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins by Helena de Bres
Release Date: November 7, 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Format: Hardcover
Source: Bought
Philosopher Helena de Bres uses the curious experience of being a twin as a lens for reconsidering our place in the world, with illustrations by her identical twin Julia.
Wait, are you you or the other one? Which is the evil twin? Have you ever switched partners? Can you read each other's mind? Twins get asked the weirdest questions by strangers, loved ones, even themselves. For Helena de Bres, a twin and philosophy professor, these questions are closely tied to some of philosophy's most unnerving unknowns. What makes someone themself rather than someone else? Can one person be housed in two bodies? What does perfect love look like? Can we really act freely? At what point does wonder morph into objectification?
Accompanied by her twin Julia's drawings, Helena uses twinhood to rethink the limits of personhood, consciousness, love, freedom, and justice. With her inimitably candid, wry voice, she explores the long tradition of twin representations in art, myth, and popular culture; twins' peculiar social standing; and what it's really like to be one of two. With insight, hope, and humor, she argues that our reactions to twins reveal our broader desires and fears about selfhood, fate, and human connection, and that reflecting on twinhood can help each of us—twins and singletons alike—recognize our own multiplicity, and approach life with greater curiosity, imagination, and courage.
I never thought I'd run into anything "too personal" to at least mention on the blog. From a distant level, I'll write about plenty of personal topics on a top-level analysis even though I keep my in-real-life applications of those concepts private. (Even if you think you can decode something from my references, you actually never know; this is a parasocial relationship, darlings! Sorry! Talk to me in person if you want to get to know me. You're only ever seeing a partial picture here, curated by a very specific mood I'm in when I post.)
Talking Twindom Feels Too Personal
I guess—even if I talk about a topic that may be personal, I keep it distant enough from my own context that it doesn't feel vulnerable at all. Discussion is strictly academic or existential, just tying in my own experiences or mistakes for the sake of explaining a more universal feeling or tendency.
If you think I've shared something particularly emotional on here, it's 100 percent not, because otherwise it wouldn't have made it to the Internet at all. I'm a weirdly open or transparent person about a lot, but am (paradoxically) very private about what matters most within my personal life.
And I do think people are way too lenient on the Internet when it comes to others' consent and privacy, which I've gotten better about over the years. Unless someone is overtly cool with it, I never reference any specific situations in my life with identifying details (or any emotion someone's shared with me) and would never air out anything someone's told me in confidence. If I think there's a detail someone wouldn't like—or that might lead others to figuring out who they are—I wouldn't post it because I don't think we have the right to cross boundaries like that.
But there is objectively no way for me that I can fully write a holistic overview of being an identical twin without it being too personal. Sorry. You'll have to talk to me if you know me in real life for the accurate scoop, because I have too many complex thoughts on how being a twin has affected my reality, and how this book challenged or reinforced various views on twindom. Instead, I'm sharing a few highlights and tipping points for convos, but nothing that gets to the core of anything particularly emotional about it.
So Instead, We're Sharing Highlights
Over the past month or two of the blog being live again, I've loved maintaining living docs like my happy lists and quote compilations. I've maintained running lists of books and swept about once a week for typos I find far too frequently on posts that have been up for far too long without correction. Recently, I've been taking notes and annotating as I read, which I've never done this frequently before. In my reviews of certain titles like Meditations by Marcus Aurelius or Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, I wanted to share how many lines I underlined and what exactly struck me, but found my reviews getting far too long.
So I decided I'm going to post some (spoiler-heavy: you won't want to click into these if you don't want an exhaustive amount of content from each) highlights and annotations from some books like these that feel significant. Whether I chat about individual lines or just share fragments as I go, you can consult any of these scraps posts for what I've highlighted. I don't necessarily agree with everything I highlight either; it just means a particular thought or excerpt caught my interest or sparked a connection.
In a case like How to Be Multiple, I can share some striking lines or thoughts without having to evaluate the book in a larger context. Books are inherently subjective, so there doesn't feel like there's a method of reviewing How to Be Multiple that doesn't incorporate emotion that I'd be uncomfortable sharing to the broader Internet. So instead, here are some aspects from the book that I found interesting. Feel free to read and discuss it with me one-on-one!
Would I Recommend It?
Absolutely yes. There's some I didn't agree with, but I overall thought it was fascinating as a twin and would be especially illuminating for a "singleton." (Hannah—my identical twin—and I have decided we love the term.) Whether you like considering how much control you have over yourself, how you relate to others, etc,. or just want a clear, entertaining philosophical read, How to Be Multiple did feel well-done.
I do think Helena de Bres is right in making a point I hadn't considered before: that twins are so fascinating to others because they do challenge concepts of personhood that we wouldn't otherwise think about. Twins push the boundaries on what we think about independence, relationships, etc,. I also hadn't realized that identical twins only occur in four out of every thousand births. So I'm *special.*
Some Thoughts, Lines, and Brief Commentary—
Here are some lines and thoughts that struck me from the book. She talks about being othered, having a physical mirror, forcing twins to be binary/opposite, where exactly we get our sense of self (i.e. mind/body problem), creepy ideas about twin relationships, how twins challenge ideas of autonomy and free will, etc,. etc,.
“Much of the experience of twinhood is determined not by twinship itself but by the response of non-twins to it.”
“In everyday life, all twins are susceptible to being treated as, if not the same person, at least somewhat less than two.”
“The prospect of [losing hold of our own identities] horrifies many of us raised in Western culture because we're deeply attached to being discrete individuals with sharply distinct physical, mental, and emotional barriers between ourselves and other humans. Our ideal of a healthy and dignified person is an adult in full control of their mind and body, who rationally pursues their personal aims largely independent of the influence and interference of others...Twins and other freaks make visible our physical and emotional vulnerability and our social interdependence.”
“When it comes to philosophical. questions of personal identity, love, freedom, and the like, are twins a unique case, an enlightening exception to the human norm? Or are twins intellectually illuminating instead, because they offer particularly vivid examples of experiences all humans share?”
On the tendency of others to binarize twins, and for twins themselves (especially identical) to feel the need to take on opposite characteristics at times:
“Twin identity confusion also unsettles us for deeper reasons. It's easy to forget, since we don't have cause to think about it often, that the ability to reliably and accurately assign a unique identity to those we meet is an absolutely basic requirement of social interaction.”
“We find the general slipperiness of social identity unsettling, and therefore want to pin it down rapidly.”
“When [my twin] and I were growing up, some of our friends and relations felt the need to explicitly announce which of us they'd identified as being closest to their soul, as if we were options in a personality questionnaire.”
“When I think about all of this for too long, I start to get nauseous...Feeling as though you have your own thing, that in your social sphere, small as it may be, you're irreplaceable, is a way of feeling your life is meaningful, that you're making a valuable difference to the universe.”
“Is there a way to insist that the self is a real, persisting thing without sounding naïve? And is there a way to salvage the idea that we know, at least partly, what that real self is like, even while acknowledging the powerful forces of internal and external suggestion on our sense of who we are?”
On the boundaries of the self, or the sense that twins are somehow less individual:
“Singletons have a habit of implying that twins aren't fully distinct people, but rather—somehow—a single person spread over two bodies...If asked directly, most people would deny that they consider twins a metaphysical unit, but their behavior often suggests that they're inclined in that direction.”
On the concept of socially extending our cognition, and how natural that actually is:
“Daniel Wegner's studies of what he terms transactive memory explores how couples or groups use each other as repositories of distinct forms of information, allowing each other to remember more than they would singly. Couples also "cross-cue" each other, remembering in tandem by throwing prompts back and forth until they trigger each other's recollections.”
A definition I'm okay with (preserving the individuality while also recognizing a unified parallel):
“Twins who work in this way remind me of the concept of 'plural agency' philosophers talk about...What's crucial is that two or more people have genuinely joint concerns and values. They recognize a set of common aims, commit to acting as a group to pursue them, and care about the group itself, as an aspect of their own agency. In this way, they create and act from a new, unified entity—a plural agent—alongside their own individual selves.”
She had a lot of interesting thoughts on self-sovereignty and individualism and Western culture and what we control about ourselves and others, and how twins challenge that view because our very presence emphasizes how we're affected by others (even as discrete individuals.) So where does individuality start? Separate minds? Separate personalities? What about when you form a friendship or relationship with somebody? What is a "separate" unit, and what are you together?
Some of the ideas and opposing points to individualism made me feel suddenly claustrophobic and nauseous because (as every personality test ever tells me), self-reliance is one of my core values.
My sense of self is so dependent on being my own person (alone) that some of her ideas about blurriness made me feel so distinctively dizzy and trapped by my own twin status. Which, for the record, is why I'm also so weird about ever opening up romantically. (I feel suffocated whenever I become attached to anyone romantically—like I'm diluting the independence I've already had to fight so hard for. Romantic closeness itself has been historically challenging for me because it threatens some of these knee-jerk ideals, although I do somehow still want it. I just have...a bit more of a bridge to cross than others to get there.)
I'm already treated so frequently in relation to someone else, and am very aware that I can never fully stretch my autonomy the way I want to because I am inherently relationally defined—even by her absence. People don't intend to, and it would be easy to say "Oh, you don't have to do that to yourself," but it's true.
And then de Bres goes on to talk about social relationships that twins have to others, beyond what she's established about boundaries of the self, binary definitions, nature vs. nurture, etc,. She also talks about the tension around twins and free will. I don't agree with all of her thoughts here, but underlined a whole lot that I absolutely can't entirely duplicate here because I'd fill so many quote boxes.
“The idea that twinship provides a uniquely secure solution to loneliness and alienation is probably the biggest attraction of being a twin, for twins and singletons alike.”
“Many of us seem tempted by the thought that any highly intense and intimate connection will necessarily tend towards the sexual, or at least the romantic...Any intensely intimate bond will tend to fire up broader human anxieties about engulfment and the loss of self in human relationships.”
A Note on Twin Relationships vs. Other Relationships
Hannah and I very much have our own lives and diverge from a certain type of twin depicted in here that just want each other. (We would like our own marriages, partners, etc,. to be "our people," thank you very much. I'd like to find a "my person" that I chose—not one that I was born with.) I do know identical twins who do absolutely everything together and have no desire to experience seemingly separate lives, but that is so not us.
But the book also did lay out some truths about why others find it difficult to date or connect to twins at times, incorporating all this existential ish. It's a little disorienting, for sure, and people can be unintentionally weird about it. From within the twin bond, it was weird for me the first time my sister fell in love because I suddenly had less access to her time and realized the ways in which we'd rebalance due to romantic relationships. But I was of course happy for her and liked the guy in question, so it wasn't threatening in the way people like to creepily expect.
I do think choice is what makes the decision to partner with other people more special, so falling in love with other people has helped me figure out what I care about most within twindom too. When I was in love in college, I knew because I said I'd never had someone seemingly understand me as well as my twin did. At that point of history and chemistry, I felt like I could similarly "read" someone else the way I could for her.
Now, I'm aware that my ideal partner would probably strike a balance like how I describe my twin when people ask me how similar the two of us are. I tend to say Hannah and I are alike in our values and foundations, but might have different expressions, methods, or habits within those. The partner version would be that we're alike in our values and foundations, but might have differences that complement and strengthen each other too. I'd like to be great alone, but also be with someone who makes me better because their strengths are complementary to mine in a way that makes me want to "rise to their level" in certain attributes. I don't have a distinctive "must be similar" or "opposites attract" mentality because everyone is so their own person, so each relationship is too. So how similar does that make us?
And then some other weird bits of adding others to the picture as a twin:
For example, people sometimes ask me how being a twin affects my relationships, as though the twin dynamic is a third wheel. While it's a natural question ("what would happen if Hannah didn't approve of me?" twins are just as individual as anyone else.) In my experience, our influence on each other's relationships isn't as significant as the influence of others assuming that we affect each other's choices.
Whereas other people just get to be entirely themselves, people do treat twins differently here: like I have less control over my choices than I do. We have a unique bond, but we're still separate individuals. Sometimes, I feel complete helplessness and despair in knowing that I can't escape being seen in relation to her, even by someone who doesn't know her as well. It feels different than someone being insecure about social reception from someone's broader family or friend group.
Romantically, I've always needed someone I loved to see me as my own, conscious self—and that's partly why it takes me so long to get to know and love anyone. For that reason, I've also learned I have very little patience for people thinking too hard about "what others might think" when it comes to their own private relationships. Regardless of intention, it is a little fucked up when people—especially romantic partners—unintentionally make assumptions about twins, because it feels disrespectful to my autonomy. Ask me what I think. Don't assume it. (Probably a good rule in general, because studies show that, when assuming what our friends and family think, we only get it right about 35% of the time.)
Twinship, in my experiences, has only influenced my (very) high standards, unshakeable love for independence, and some fears about losing said autonomy to a relationship in which someone else doesn't respect my need to maintain my individuality. You're going to sync up with another person, yeah, but blurry codependence does not appeal. (Also, an essay in The Cut a few years ago claimed that twins tend to have higher empathy and higher conflict-resolution skills because they're forced to iron out problems with each other and coexist within partnership so young. I'd like to believe that's true.)


She's my best friend, not another half, although I do affectionately call her a soulmate. A soulmate, or the first one perhaps. But she definitely (hopefully) won't be my only.
“Adult twins seem, on average, marginally happier and healthier than the standard human. They're at lower risk of depression and suicide than singletons, and there's evidence they're underrepresented in psychiatric populations more generally. They also have higher life expectancy, once they get past their vulnerable first year.”
“The answer is complicated, but one deep thing [people who angst about free will] arguably want is to preserve their sense of self-worth, grounded—for those raised in Western cultures—in their status as self-governing agents.”
On having someone exactly like you run a parallel life. Mimetic desire tells us that it's harder to get along with those similar to us who remind us of the paradox of choice, and this is one aspect of twinhood that is impossible to get away from.
For me, the fear of enmeshment (and my suffocated sensitivity to my individuality) is my main struggle in being a twin because it's made me wildly hyperindependent; her parallel life introducing inescapable curiosity about my own path is the other.
I'm a very confident person so get over this quickly, but it is emotionally tricky at times to see someone else raised the exact same way as you, with all the same privileges (and similar attributes) make ever-so-slightly different calculations. Because other people don't get that "what if?" ability to watch alternative choices unfold, even though we are our own individual selves. The burden of choice!
“This is the only real source of tension between [my twin] and me because, though I love her more than anything, she's one of the people I try to get away from. She's used to it, and doesn't take offense, but sometimes it hurts her. I know I'm hurting her, but I do it anyway, and that hurts me, too.”
“You don't have to be a twin to feel this kind of existential grief, or have it inflamed by the sight or idea of twins...Is there a way for any of us to feel better about our lost fantasy futures?”
“That human life inevitably involves uncompensated loss sounds like bad news, but there's a positive way of looking at it too. The grief we feel for lives unchosen is the price we pay for a world that's overflowing with many and diverse kinds of value.”
“There will usually be plenty to value in the activities and relationships you did choose, and focusing on the particularities of those is a handy way to avoid getting swamped by regret. 'In order to avoid regret, you must preserve a measure of oblivion.' This is one way in which being a twin is genuinely worse than being a standard human being.”
“Watching [my twin] dart out in directions different from those I've taken has often made me feel vividly what a vast array of paths are open to all of us collectively.”
On people objectifying twins (which does happen.) She talks about this both sexually—which like, I've literally watched men hit on one of us then switch to the other sister throughout the night on multiple occasions, which does happen to other women but is especially intensified for twins, I think—and within science experiments and whatnot.
“Twins have been regular targets of objectification for forever. How much easier to objectify women if they're literally interchangeable, like, you know, twins are?”
She makes the excellent point that although twins are often used for science because they provide a natural control vs. affected scenario, there are almost no studies for twins themselves. We are helpful to research goals related to individuals, but don't get the same benefit of understanding.
She has a lot of other banger lines that I'm too sleepy to cite entirely. (Just read the book!) But her conclusion wraps up a lot of thoughtful ideas on autonomy and how twins challenge regular people.
“What cultural work can twins do for us now? [In the West], we're attached to the idea of [being entirely discrete] because we ground our autonomy in it, along with our dignity and value. From this perspective, other people, no matter how much we love them, are a major metaphysical and ethical hazard. Get too close, and they risk dissolving the bodily, mental, and emotional boundaries that make each of us who we are. Twins put pressure on this picture of personhood in multiple ways.”
“Twins offer a concrete, real-life example of how someone can be their own distinctive person while embracing the lifelong role of another in shaping their identity, values, and agency in the world...Why think that autonomy and sociality are always opposed, that mutual enmeshment must ever reduce the self rather than expand it?”
Again, this book kind of made me feel trapped inside myself and the twin bond, but is probably good for me to read from a fear inoculation standpoint because I know that sensitivity to the "loss of myself" is where literally all my connection woes lie. Even if I ached the whole way through reading it, and also ached again while writing this review, because I don't know what the answer is!
Being a twin has shaped my perspective on identity, but it doesn't dictate my choices or relationships. It just adds a lens.
I'm not just suddenly cool with having boundaries diluted (in this case: around my individuality), even if many of her points are spot-on, but it does help me understand them. I'm sure anyone who feels similarly to me—regardless of being a twin—might benefit from the same confrontation of worldview.
“We each contain multitudes, we're often told. What if we lived, really lived, like that were true?”