Review: "The Surviving Twin" by Diana Lockwood

The Surviving Twin by Diana Lockwood

Published October 2020 via Toplight Books

★★★★

For the longest time, it was Lockwood and her sister against the world. Their parents were on their side—their mother, who understood much earlier than most that chances were good that the twins experienced the world through the lens of autism, and their father, who understood this less viscerally but ultimately wanted them to be happy and safe—but much of the world wants conformity, and ‘that Diana/Julia girl’ could not conform.

This is not a story for the faint of heart. Depression and attempted suicide and completed suicide, sexual assault and stays in psychiatric wards, anorexia, a bond that at times was necessary for survival and at other times may have kept necessary parts of the world out.

I’ve read relatively few books about living with autism/Asperger’s, and fewer about women and girls—girls are much less likely to be diagnosed than boys, because they present differently. They mask it better. And while a lack of diagnosis might have some perks, like lack of label-related stigma (at one point Julia and Diana—pseudonyms, by the way—argue that they’re glad they didn’t have a childhood diagnosis, because they got to have a ‘normal’ childhood), it also means lack of support, lack of interventions and understanding that could smooth the way somewhat. But this is such a clear-eyed picture of what that experience looked like, not just how it felt to be in the sharper difficulties of autism and depression and so on, but how it must have looked from the outside. It's also important to note that although there is a lot of hard in here, Lockwood is also careful not to make it a misery memoir—to highlight good things, and moments where things clicked, as well as the difficult things. Not an easy read, but a thoughtful one.