Christina Baker Kline Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

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 ...