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In 2000, Ms. Pogrebin and her husband, David Shapiro, bought their first weekend escape -a house once owned by the actress Eartha Kitt-in Merryall, and moved to Washington two years ago.
Now, she and her children-Ben, 12, and Molly, 10-spend weekends and much of their summer here, where she says, "We are lazier and at the same time, more active, if that makes any sense. We read more, but we also walk more." Active in this household means hiking at Bull's Bridge or Meeker Swamp, or racing up the nearest hill. And for Ms. Pogrebin, an accomplished journalist, her home provides a perfect, unhurried atmosphere for writing, which she has been doing full time since 1998.
Her byline is well-known in the journalistic world, from her insightful articles for Talk and Brill's Content, to pieces she produced at the CBS News Magazine "60 Minutes," including one on the genocide in Rwanda and an Emmy-nominated profile of the actress Candice Bergen. Ms. Pogrebin's list of former bosses and mentors reads like an all-star lineup of the profession's heaviest hitters: Charlie Rose, Tina Brown, Fred Friendly, Ed Bradley and Mike Wallace. Her producer's chops, honed alongside these giants, are on full display in her latest book, "One and the Same: My Life As an Identical Twin and What I've Learned About Everyone's Struggle to Be Singular" (Doubleday, $26.95). But the confrontational interviews and reporter's detachment are only part of the story, because the book is, at heart, a memoir, inspired by a midlife fork-in-the-road with her twin sister, New York Times reporter Robin Pogrebin.
On a dismal fall day, with the windows being blasted by rain, Ms. Pogrebin is passionate, even sunny, about her lifelong twin journey and recent education on the subject. She has a distinct low and raspy voice, with vocal chords damaged by a girlhood singing show tunes with Robin, stints as a child actor on Broadway, and by performing and directing musical theater at Yale.
"My twinship changed in a way that I resisted," she says. Not long ago, Robin, with whom her relationship was-throughout her life and like most sets of identical twins-intimate to the point of near-romance, began to pull away. "Where Robin needed more distance, I felt we should be as close as we ever were. I didn't really understand my sister's perspective. And I found, in my research, that very often, at some point, twins are not on the same page."
As a chronicle of her past, present and future as an identical twin, "One and the Same ..." is Ms. Pogrebin's personal quest to make sense of the unusual circumstances of her birth. "Robin and I were indistinguishable to most people, and it conferred an immediate celebrity without doing anything," she says. "It gives you confidence that may not be real and makes you feel emboldened. You feel secure because someone is always at your side. You're not out there on your own." But despite their deep, almost telepathic connection, their similar career paths and family choices, when Robin began to want less twin-time, the writer found herself disconnected in a way that was unfamiliar. What resulted was an investigation of "singularity"- what gives each of us a unique, personal, individual identity of our own.
"There is a parallel life that you're living that begs for comparison and begs for contrast constantly. I've learned in this book how important distinction is, not just to feel like you're an individual in the world but because, if you have your own territory, you have a clearer sense of yourself."
The memoir provides the book's core, and the reference point to which she intermittently (and comfortably) returns throughout. These personal stories are interwoven with research findings and expert interviews about twin-related scientific and psychological issues and with profiles of many sets of identical twins, all of which serve to illustrate a different, unique aspect of twinship.
As a writer, Ms. Pogrebin's specialty is in turning ordinary topics that are highly personal to her but that some might consider niche, into gripping yarns that, by her rendering, become universal. In other words, you sit down to read a book about twins and you find yourself glued to a page turner about the human condition. Her subject matter tends to find her. Ms. Pogrebin's first book, "Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish," published in 2005, consisted of interviews with Jewish luminaries about their faith, or lack of it. Over the course of writing and researching her book, it became apparent that an examination of her own Jewish practice, faith and heritage was inevitable. It stood to reason that her next book would be about her twinship, the aspect of her life that has most shaped her identity.
"I think you have to want to spend a lot of time with a subject, and not a lot of subjects fit the bill for me. What both of the books have in common, if anything, is that they both covered subjects that I was wrestling with without realizing it. They both started out as straight journalistic projects and ended up being very personal investigations. Maybe I'm naïve in not seeing that coming but that is not what I set out to do. I did not set out to write a memoir. And this very much became one."
As a memoirist, Ms. Pogrebin avoids the tendency to gaze at the navel. In "One and the Same ... " she opts instead to look beyond her own experience and put it in an empirical, scientific and genetic context, while measuring her own observations with those of the other twins who populate her book, sometimes colorfully. In these sections, she lets the interview subjects reveal themselves rather than have the writer do it for them with commentary. The starkness of these passages can be hilarious, such as the interviews from the annual convention in Twinsburg, Ohio, where 71- year-olds wear matching dresses. They can also be heartbreaking, such as the chapter about a rare illness passed on through identical twins to their respective children.
She uses her reporting background to unearth some fairly brutal truths about current multiple birth trends and to investigate other controversial theories pertaining to twins. One of them is "vanished twin syndrome," whereby the early loss of a twin in utero, believed to occur in 10 per cent of pregnancies, is believed to have lasting psychological effects on the "survivor," such as a lifelong sense of feeling untethered, or a sense of loss.
"There is a growing body of evidence-not scientific, I want to point that out-but that is anecdotal and mounting. There are very good reasons to be skeptical," she says, "But it is interesting and I think it can't be fully discounted."
Due to the current twin glut due to fertility interventions, Ms. Pogrebin's readers are also likely to be parents or expectant parents of multiples, because the reality is nuanced and not at all straightforward. "I wrote the book not just for people who are twins or know twins, but for people who have them. I did want to say, "Don't just follow the guidebooks and parenting manuals on raising twins. Listen to twins who have lived a lifetime because I think there's wisdom in it for raising pairs.'"
She did not set out to answer all of our questions about identity when she began to inundate herself in twin research and expertise two years ago. But the fact that the book resonates for everyone is because, through the prism of her own story, she addresses a purely human urge, not isolated to twins, to be understood, and singled out.
"It is the question of how high the hurdle is to make your mark on the world, or to feel known. It doesn't mean that every one of us needs to be famous, or even special, but we do need to be singular. I think this is a fundamental impulse. And the twin phenomenon puts this issue under a microscope. There is a blurring that is a risk for any of us and to me, that's an interesting human condition."
Ms. Pogrebin will continue her work traveling, lecturing on both books, and gearing up for her next project, which she hopes will be an authorized biography of a fascinating contemporary figure. As for Robin, to whom "One and the Same ...," is dedicated, Abigail Pogrebin says though it might be too pat to say that writing the book has brought them closer, it has made them more communicative.
""I wrote this book as a clumsy way of sending a message to her, and it's absolutely changed the way we are," she says. "I think we're more honest now, and there's an intimacy in honesty."
