Christina Baker Kline is the author of “The Foursome.” Photo: Beouwolf Sheehan
The novelist Christina Baker Kline always knew that she was distantly related to the two sisters who married the world-famous conjoined twins Eng and Chang Bunker. But when she first sat down to write a novel about them, she was initially intimidated by the challenge of writing about these men, who had been sold by their mother in Siam and later became slave owners themselves.
The Foursome, which is being released today by Mariner Books, is Kline’s eighth novel. She’s also written a thriller and five nonfiction books. A longtime Montclair resident who recently moved back to New York City, Kline is a New York Times bestselling author best known for her novel Orphan Train.
This new book reimagines the true story of two sisters in nineteenth century North Carolina who married the conjoined twins, and between them had 21 children. Spanning five decades and unfolding against the backdrop of the Civil War, The Foursome brings to life a forgotten chapter of American history and the complex, boundary-defying marriages at its center.
“I realize there are stories in our history that are neglected,” Kline said at a talk about her new book at the Montclair Literary Festival/Open Book Open Mind event this week. “Stories that exist in the margins of better-known events, or in the shadows of famous men. Sarah and Adelaide (the wives in the novel) weren’t featured in newspaper accounts; they didn’t sit for portraits and leave behind boxes of letters. Fiction allows me to ask: what did their lives feel like from the inside? What was the private cost of this public story?”
It took Kline three years to write this novel. Along the way, she dealt with questions about who gets to tell someone’s story and worries that she might be writing a revisionist history of the couples’ lives. Finally, her cousin said to her, “If you don’t tell their story, who will?”
When she stumbled on the Bunker family graveyard in North Carolina—where own her family was from—she realized that one of the sisters, Sara, wasn’t buried with the twins and her sister, but rather with her four daughters, and with the formerly enslaved people who once worked for her. That helped Kline realize that there had to be some tension between the two sisters, and in their marriages.
“I wanted to make their extraordinary lives seem real,” says Kline. “They had so many tragedies—they lost children. The question was, could I go deep enough?”
The novel, set in 1839, centers on Sarah and Adelaide Yates, daughters of a once-prominent local family brought low by scandal, who are drawn into the twins’ world. Bold, beautiful Adelaide sees a chance to reclaim her future, while her Sarah, who quiet and observant, isn’t so sure. When the twins’ lives become entangled with theirs, they must navigate loyalty, longing, and identity in a world where everything—including race, class, and gender—is rigidly defined.
