Description
Product Description
"[Dieterich's] writing is crisp and intelligent . . . She writes about her own reckoning with her sexuality and exploration of queer identity without becoming pat or coy, giving readers intimate access to her fears and conflicting emotions." --NPR
For as long as she can remember, Leah has had the mysterious feeling that she’s been searching for a twin--that she should be part of an intimate pair. It begins with dance partners as she studies ballet growing up; continues with her attractions to girlfriends in college; and leads her, finally, to Eric, whom she moves across the country for and marries. But her steadfast, monogamous relationship leaves her with questions about her sexuality and her identity, so she and her husband decide to try an open marriage.
How does a young couple make room for their individual desires, their evolving selfhoods, and their artistic ambitions while building a life together? Can they pursue other sexual partners, even live in separate cities, and keep their original passionate bond alive?
Vanishing Twins looks for answers in psychology, science, pop culture, art, architecture, Greek mythology, dance, and language to create a lucid, suspenseful portrait of a woman testing the limits and fluidities of love.
Review
Praise for Vanishing Twins
Shortlisted for the 2019 Pacific Northwest Book Award
Named a Best Book of Fall by NYLON
"It's exactly this tension between retaining your individuality and absorbing yourself into someone else that unfurls throughout Vanishing Twins . . . Her writing is crisp and intelligent, she relies on architecture, Greek mythology and even language to place her relationship in the context of a wider world . . . Dieterich maintains her searching, inquisitive voice throughout Vanishing Twins. She writes about her own reckoning with her sexuality and exploration of queer identity without becoming pat or coy, giving readers intimate access to her fears and conflicting emotions." ―NPR
"Leah Dieterich's memoir, Vanishing Twins, is filled with that specific sharp agony; it echoes with longing, vibrates with the effort Dieterich undergoes as she pushes the boundaries of who she is, both as an individual and within the context of her marriage. Within both realms―the individual and the partnered―Dieterich explores what it means to have options and to choose one thing over another; she and her husband open their marriage, and she explores what it means to expand and maintain connections to another person and to herself. All of this exploration is done in the kind of beautifully written fragments that lodge inside you after reading, so that you carry these thoughts around inside of you, exploring the themes until they become, if not your own, then something shared, and elevated, because of it." ―NYLON
"In many ways, Dieterich's provocative, poetic memoir is about wanting more than what we―particularly as women―are told we can have. It is a meditation on openness and constraints, on partnership and absence, and it hinges on Dieterich's experience of a period of polyamory within her marriage, a time during which both she and her husband explored relationships with other partners while also staying tethered to one another. But it is also a book about making choices, and knowing that those decisions are best made after thoroughly exploring the available options, and also fully getting to know ourselves in the process." ―NYLON
"A gorgeous portrait of marriage that is searching, fractured, [and] humane." ―Marina Benjamin, New Statesman, One of the Books of the Year
"Vanishing Twins is more than a memoir about love and marriage. It’s a literary experiment in both structure and subject, a novel mix of theory and story." ―Rebecca Schuh, Bookforum
"Dieterich’s book tells us there isn’t any one way to create a sexual life and I’m grateful for that invitation . . . [Her] voice is inviting, the prose simple and confident and I found myself thinking of the narrator