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The Foursome is inspired by my own family history: the strange-but-true story of two sisters in 19th-century North Carolina – Sarah and Adelaide Yates, distant cousins of mine – who married Eng and Chang Bunker, the world-famous conjoined twins. Together, the two couples had twenty-one children.
Writing this novel was like uncovering a hidden branch of my family tree, one deeply entwined with the history and contradictions of the American South. Both of my parents come from Southern families that go back generations; my mother grew up in North Carolina, my father in Georgia, in a time of immense social upheaval and cultural change. That legacy is woven through these pages.
I’ve long been drawn to overlooked corners of the past, especially those that challenge what we think we know. In this case, the questions felt deeply personal: Why would two conventional young women in rural North Carolina choose to marry conjoined brothers from Siam (now Thailand)? What might their lives have looked like behind closed doors? How did they navigate privacy, intimacy, and the relentless public scrutiny that followed them?
The more I learned, the more complex – and compelling – their story became. And the deeper I went, the more urgent the narrative felt.
How could I write honestly about the moral blind spots of the past without flattening the people who lived through them?
The Foursome is a work of fiction, grounded in research and shaped by imagination. In writing it, I stayed as close to the historical record as possible. I drew from a wide range of sources, including in biographies, census and war records, academic studies, oral histories, psychological research, personal letters, plays, and novels. I visited Wilkes and Surry Counties, North Carolina, where the Bunkers settled; walked the lands they farmed; and interviewed some of their descendants. I toured plantations and other historic Southern sites, places that bear witness to the lives of the enslaved people who built and sustained them. I visited the Siamese Twins Museum in Mount Airy, North Carolina, and the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. In piecing together the narrative of these real people’s lives, I tried to imagine not only what happened, but how it would have felt.
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The historical record is fragmentary, and fiction has its own demands. While Eng and Chang’s lives are well documented, the lives of their wives, Sarah and Adelaide – like those of so many women of the era – remain largely unrecorded. Writing from Sarah’s first-person perspective, I took creative liberties in imagining her inner world: her thoughts and emotions, her shifting loyalties, her evolving sense of self. I cannot know what she truly felt, only what the historical record and my imagination could suggest.
Three quotes from my research offered a point of entry. In The Two, Irving and Amy Wallace write that Sarah Bunker “is not buried beside her husband, as is commonly believed, but for some reason still rests on Eng’s farm beneath a gravestone that is now hard to find.” Kay Hunter, in Duet of a Lifetime, notes that “Sarah was buried in an unmarked grave on her and Eng’s property, where many of the family’s children and slaves were also buried.” Joseph Orser, in The Lives of Chang & Eng, describes this neglected site: “A few miles from the White Plains cemetery, on family land, there is a private cemetery that holds the body of a central actor in the historical drama – Sarah Bunker. The contrast between this site and the burial site of her husband, sister, and brother-in-law is stark … The stones themselves are in disrepair, the writing on many no longer legible, worn by the years and elements.”
This odd detail lodged in my mind. I had originally planned to alternate between the sisters’ perspectives, but when I discovered that Sarah was not buried in the family graveyard alongside her husband and sister, something shifted. I saw in that separation a quiet act of defiance. A woman stepping out of the collective frame. I began to imagine a voice shaped by the constraints of her time, slowly awakening to its inequities. Writing from Sarah’s point of view allowed me to explore not just what happened, but how a person might evolve from unquestioning acceptance to discomfort, and eventually toward a clearer understanding of the world she inhabited – and of her place within it.
To shape the novel’s emotional arc, I made some significant narrative choices. I imagined the sisters’ motivations for marrying the brothers and adjusted certain timelines. In real life, Grace – the enslaved woman who plays a central role – was older than Sarah; in the novel, they are the same age, which allowed me to trace parallel paths through a divided world. Aunt Joan is a fictional character. I also combined two devastating infant losses into one, to maintain narrative momentum without diminishing emotional truth.
The historian Nell Irvin Painter once said, “The past changes according to what questions we ask.” As I wrote this book, I kept returning to the question of how we carry history forward – what we’re willing to see, and how we choose to remember. As with much of Southern history, the record holds painful truths, much of it still hidden, unacknowledged, or only now coming to light. Some biographies and other accounts suggest that one or both of the Bunker brothers may have fathered children with enslaved women. In the novel, I chose to reflect that possibility through Eng’s character – not to sensationalize, but to acknowledge the power dynamics and the brutal realities of slavery. Biographer Yunte Huang, in Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and their Rendezvous with American History, notes that while no formal record exists, “descendants had grown up with family stories about how Patrick Bunker, Eng’s son, ‘used to play with his half-sisters and half-brothers who were enslaved.’”
I approached this material with humility, care, and a deep sense of responsibility. I don’t pretend to have gotten everything right. But I hope the novel honors the complexity of these lives, the contradictions they embodied, and the humanity at their core.
