Christina Baker Kline Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews

An interview with Christina Baker Kline

A letter from the author to readers of The Foursome

Dear Reader,

Every family harbors its secrets, its strange-but-true tales. In mine, one extraordinary piece of lore endures: that we are linked, through marriage, to Chang and Eng Bunker, the world-famous conjoined twins from Siam. In 1843, my distant cousins Sarah "Sallie" and Adelaide "Addie" Yates married the Bunker brothers in North Carolina. Together, the two couples raised twenty-one children and forged one of the most unconventional domestic arrangements in American history.

For years I hesitated to take on their story. It was thorny and complex, raising questions of identity, exploitation, race, and culture. My cousin – a librarian at Duke and our family genealogist – came to me after a Bunker family reunion and said what I'd been avoiding: "Th ese women are our ancestors. If you don't tell their story, who will?"

Once I began to dig, the questions multiplied. Why would two conventional young women from a prominent Southern family choose to marry conjoined brothers who were the objects of relentless public speculation? What were their lives really like behind closed doors? And why, I discovered, was one sister buried not with her husband, his brother, and her sister in the family cemetery, but alone on their former farm, beneath a hard-to-fi nd stone among people the family had enslaved?

In Sarah's separation, I glimpsed a woman stepping out of the collective frame. This detail unlocked her voice for me, and with it a story of desire and constraint, complicity and rebellion, set against the backdrop of a nation hurtling toward war.

The Foursome grew from a desire to honor these remarkable lives while grappling with the moral complexities of their time – and ours. It is a work of imagination grounded in research, shaped by the questions we ask of the past and how we choose to carry history forward.

I invite you into the world of Sarah and Adelaide, Chang and Eng – four people whose boundary-defying choices made a family unlike any other, in a place and time that demanded conformity above all else.

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.