The Silent Twins: Now a major motion picture starring Letitia Wright

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The thing about this book is that it’s not great, and you know that going into it, as it was written by a 16 year old who was dealing with a LOT in her personal life. Wallace, one of the only people June and Jennifer would talk to, ended up reporting extensively on the behavior that allegedly spooked the Broadmoor staff. The twins would alternate which one of them would eat food while the other one went hungry. For a time they were separated, and staff would discover that both girls, though kept in cells far apart from one another, were motionless, frozen in the exact same position. Tamara Lawrance (left) and Letitia Wright share an unusual bond in “The Silent Twins.” Lukasz Bak/Focus Features

June wrote:“I feel like suicide, but will that help? I have fresh marks on my face to prove how distressing life is becoming with my twin sister. Have I the strength to kill her?”Yet, June and Jennifer fell ill whenever they were separated, as if linked by a sinister spell. Mi piacciono molto i libri basati su una storia vera. La vicenda delle gemelle Gibbons è davvero incredibile. Le due ragazze sono state vittime di pregiudizi e dell'ignoranza. Hanno vissuto una gran parte della loro vita rinchiuse tra istituti e carcere. The girls dropped out of school in their mid-teens, registered for unemployment, and retired into their room. The family could hear them talk and type but hardly ever saw the pair. Jennifer and June wrote books and novels and meticulously chronicled their lives in diaries. June: "All through my schooldays I often thought and confessed I was a boy. I got strange feeling I was a boy under all my female assets. It’s as though I’d been a boy first in my life." June wrote in her diary:“Today my beloved twin sister Jennifer died. She is dead. Her heart stopped beating. She will never recognize me. Mom and Dad came to see her body. I kissed her stone-colored face. I went hysterical with grief.”Marjorie Wallace with the Gibbons twins during a visit to Broadmoor in 1993. PA Images via Getty Images

Oh my god, I cannot believe I have a copy of this book. Sure, it's a photocopy. It's still worth its wait in gold. When the literary world ignored them, the twins began to dabble in routine teenage rebellion—promiscuity, shoplifting, drinking and huffing glue—but eventually graduated to breaking and entering. “Why do this?” June wrote in her diary. “Nothing else to do. No friend. Nothing to fill in the cold hour.” For five weeks in late 1981, the girls went on a breaking and entering spree, culminating in their attempt to set fire to a building on a local technical college campus. They were caught and remanded to infamous psychiatric hospital Broadmoor for an indefinite period of time, the draconian sentence justified by their array of undecipherable psychiatric symptoms more than their crimes, which were basically victim-less. They stayed in Broadmoor for over a decade. WALLACE: I always liked being with them. They would have that wry little sense of humor. They would respond to jokes. Often we would spend our teas together just laughing. Another unusual thing I remember is that when characters referred to the time they would say ‘5 past of 10’ instead of 5 minutes past 10’. A few times in amongst normal language there would be an unusual obscure word that stood out, also there were too many things described as the same thing, such as Preston’s Sister and Mother are at different points of the book described as ‘comes flouncing into the room’. Preston doesn’t call his Mother 'Mum' she is referred to formally as Mrs Wylde. I originally thought she was a teacher or a neighbour, he also refers to his love rival by his full name. A classic line was Preston’s Mother referring to the noisy prison as 'it's noisy like a Prison camp’ According to Wallace’s book, Jennifer once tried to strangle June with the cord of a radio, while June once tried to drown Jennifer after they rivaled for the attention of some boys.Leah Mondesir Simmons [l] and Eva-Arianna Baxter in director Agnieszka Smoczynska's The Silent Twins. Twins Jennifer (left) and June Gibbons with journalist Marjorie Wallace, author of “The Silent Twins.” PA Images via Getty Images WALLACE: Apparently, what happened was that a car came to fetch them. Jennifer hadn't been very well the night before, and they turned and they looked at the green gates at Broadmoor. It had big, green gates. And as they closed, Jennifer slumped on June's shoulder. She fell into a coma. Why the staff didn't do anything on the way, I don't know, but they drove down to Wales. Jennifer was taken and lain on a bed in the hospital. By 6:15 that night, she'd been taken into as a casualty and she was dead. June had gone to visit her straightaway afterwards and laid a red rose over her. I felt absolutely devastated. I felt chill, and I felt so intensely sad. THE SILENT TWINS is the astounding true story of twin sisters who only communicated with one another. As a result, they created a rich, fascinating world to escape the reality of their own lives. Based on the best-selling book The Silent Twins, the film stars Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance. If they were born in this time, they would be New York Times best-selling authors and prodigies,” Wright said.

Leah Mondesir-Simmonds (left) and Eva-Arianna Baxter play the Gibbons sisters at an early age in “The Silent Twins,” out Friday. Focus Features MARJORIE WALLACE: I was a journalist working on the Insight team as an investigative journalist of The Sunday Times in London. And I came across this story, and it seemed very strange to me. The story was that there were two girls living on the coast of Wales and that these two girls had committed arson, having set fire to three buildings, but what was so strange about them was that they had never spoken to anyone in their lives. They spoke only to each other. yeah i dont know, my thoughts around this book really just boil down to the fact that im really, really glad i could read it. some of it also was sad and interesting when looking at june and jennifer themselves, how parts of the book might mirror their experiences. i desperately want to read their unpublished works, they had some really great ideas.WALLACE: It was quite an injustice that they were taken to somewhere so secure, but sadly no other institution would accept them and that was because everyone who interviewed them and found them too eerie, too spooky. I've read a few books that I've found difficult to rate, but this is probably the hardest. I'm still rating it, because I'm obsessive about that sort of thing, but... boy. WALLACE: This is June. (Reading) Nobody suffers the way I do, not with a sister; with a husband, yes; with a wife, yes; with a child, yes, but this sister of mine, a dark shadow robbing me of sunlight, is my one and only torment. When June and Jennifer Gibbons were born, it was clear to their parents early on that something was unique about them. Or, more accurately, between them.

WALLACE: I saw their parents and then they took me upstairs, and they showed me in the bedroom lots of bean bags filled with writings - exercise books. And what I discovered was that while they had been in that room alone, they had been teaching themselves to write. And I put them in the boot of the car and took them home. And I couldn't believe this, that these girls, to the outside world, hadn't spoken and had been dismissed as being zombies, had this rich imaginative life.Note: I’m reviewing the 2022 Cashen’s Gap printing of this in hardcover, but the original entry is still the only one up on Goodreads.) Born on an RAF base to Barbadian immigrant parents in 1963, June and Jennifer, the third and fourth of what would eventually be five children, were noticeably different from their peers almost from birth. The infants fought to be breast-fed simultaneously. When they entered school in a Welsh village at four years old, they were reticent, but by eight, though they read and wrote proficiently, they had simply stopped speaking—to their teachers, classmates, and even their parents, beyond a few nonverbal noises and monosyllabic answers to routine questions. Jennifer has got to die because they said the day that they left Broadmoor, the day that they were free from the secure hospital, one of them would have to give up their life to really enable the other one to be free.’ This is a poem June wrote in 1983 while she was at Broadmoor Asylum, in the full grip of hopelessness and despair, and under the influence of psychotropic drugs prescribed to ensure her compliance: June and Jennifer Gibbons were twins who made a pact at three years old to only communicate with each other. The pair upheld their agreement until Jennifer Gibbons died, freeing June to live among society. It was only through death that either could be liberated from the other. This passage from June encapsulates how irreversibly intertwined June and Jennifer were: