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1. Is The Foursome based on a true story?
Yes. The novel was inspired by the real lives of Chang and Eng Bunker – conjoined twins from Siam (now Thailand) – and their wives, two sisters from rural North Carolina. The couples had twenty-one children. While their story is drawn from history, the inner lives of the women are fictionalized.
2. What role does your own family history play in the book?
Sarah and Adelaide are my distant cousins; I grew up hearing about them and our family connection to the world-famous “Siamese Twins.” Though I was also raised in England and Maine, I am Southern through and through – my mother is from North Carolina, my father from Georgia. I drew on a deep sense of this Southern legacy, with all its complexities and contradictions. Writing this book was like uncovering a hidden branch of my family tree.
3. Why did you write this as a novel and not as a biography?
While there are many accounts of Chang and Eng’s public lives, little is known about what their wives thought, felt, or endured. Fiction gave me the freedom to imagine these hidden emotional landscapes – the private negotiations, the moments of intimacy and estrangement, the complexity beneath the surface of their shared lives. A novel isn’t bound by chronology or documentation; it can explore questions about love, identity, and power that history alone can’t answer. It offers access to the interior lives of characters the historical record leaves silent.
4. Is The Foursome historically accurate?
In writing this novel, I remained as close to the historical record as possible, drawing from biographies, academic studies, census records, oral histories, and site visits to North Carolina. Because the lives of the Bunker wives were so sparsely documented, I took creative liberties to imagine their voices, emotions, and perspectives within the known historical context.
5. What kind of research did you do for the book?
In addition to reading widely – biographies, letters, census and war records, novels, academic books and articles, accounts of Southern life and the Civil War – I visited Wilkes and Surry Counties, the Siamese Twins Museum in Mount Airy, and the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. I spoke with descendants of the Bunker family, who generously shared stories, insights, and perspectives. (For a complete list of sources, including the books, articles, and archives that informed my research, visit my website, www.christinabakerkline.com.)
6. Why didn’t you center Chang and Eng’s perspectives?
Much of my writing focuses on stories told through the eyes of those whom history tends to marginalize or forget. The Bunker twins’ lives have been extensively documented, but their wives are virtually absent from the historical record. Yet the brothers’ biographies contain moments that raise haunting questions about the women’s experiences. For instance, when Sarah and Eng’s infant died after falling into the coals, Chang and Eng left that same day to maintain their rigid schedule. For years, the twins lived forty miles apart, switching households every three days. What did that mean for the two women raising large families, often without a partner present? I wanted to imagine the emotional reality behind those facts – the inner lives that history overlooked.
7. Why did you focus on Sarah’s point of view?
I initially intended to alternate between the sisters’ perspectives, but when I learned that Sarah was buried apart from her husband and sister – on family land, in a neglected grave – it struck me as a quiet act of defiance. That detail became a narrative key: I began to imagine a woman who steps out of the collective frame, who slowly begins to question the world around her and her place within it.
8. How did your understanding of your characters change as you wrote?
At first, I saw Sallie and Addie primarily as historical figures: two cloistered Southern women whose lives happened to intersect with a strange and famous story. But as I wrote, they became real to me: flawed, layered, contradictory. I came to understand how they made the choices they did, and how much strength it took to live within – and eventually, in Sallie’s case, push against – the confines of their world. Sallie’s emotional life became the novel’s center of gravity.
9. What surprised you most in the process of writing this novel?
I expected the challenge would be imagining the strangeness of the arrangement – but what surprised me was how quickly the emotional territory felt familiar. Strip away the extraordinary circumstances and what remains are the fundamental tensions of family life: sibling rivalry, marital disappointment, the clash between duty and desire. The deeper I went, the more I understood that this was a story about universal human experiences, lived under the most unusual conditions imaginable.
10. What questions guided you as you wrote the novel?
I kept asking: How did these women make sense of their extraordinary situation, day by day? What did it mean to be married to men who could never be alone? How did they build intimacy when privacy was impossible? And how did they navigate the constant push and pull between love and resentment, duty and desire? Just as urgently, I wanted to understand how they lived within the moral framework of their time – shaped by social hierarchies, complicit in systems they may or may not have questioned. I was interested in the quiet reckonings, moments of awareness that may have flickered and faded. Or taken root.
11. What can fiction reveal about historical figures that traditional history cannot?
Fiction has a unique ability to illuminate what history leaves out. It reaches into the quiet spaces between facts and imagines emotional and psychological truths that are absent from ledgers and records. In writing The Foursome, I wasn’t only interested in what happened; I wanted to understand what it felt like to live it. Fiction offers a bridge between the documented and the deeply personal.
12. What does the novel’s title, The Foursome, signify?
The title reflects the extraordinary domestic arrangement at the heart of the story: two sisters married to conjoined twins, sharing a home and raising children together. But it also captures the emotional complexity of their situation – the way four distinct people must navigate love, desire, and identity within the confines of a shared life that offers no privacy, no escape.
13. Why did you portray Sallie’s moral awakening so gradually?
I wanted Sallie’s transformation to feel emotionally and historically plausible. She’s a woman shaped by her time and circumstance who has never been encouraged to question the world she lives in. Real moral awakenings rarely happen overnight; they’re usually painful, uneven, and incomplete. I was interested in those moments when a person begins to see what they’ve been taught to ignore, and then must decide what to do with that knowledge.
14. How did you navigate writing about slavery, especially from the perspective of a white woman whose family owned enslaved people?
I approached it with care, humility, and a deep sense of responsibility. One of the central challenges of this novel was confronting the pervasive, often unseen ways white complicity sustained the institution of slavery. Sarah and Adelaide lived within a system built on human bondage; their comfort and security were made possible by the suffering of others. I wanted to examine not only overt cruelty, but the more insidious forms of oppression: silence, rationalization, willful ignorance. Sallie’s evolving relationship with Grace lies at the moral heart of this novel.
15. Did the real-life Bunker brothers father children with enslaved women?
There is no definitive proof, but several biographers of Chang and Eng have noted the possibility, and some family stories – along with recent claims by individuals who believe they may be descended from the brothers – suggest it may have occurred. In the novel, I chose to explore that possibility through Eng’s character, not to sensationalize, but to acknowledge the brutal power dynamics of slavery and the complexity of historical silence. History shows us that such relationships, typically coercive and unrecorded, were not uncommon in the antebellum South. To ignore that possibility would’ve been its own kind of erasure.
16. Are the characters of Grace and Aunt Joan based on real people?
Grace, the enslaved woman central to the novel, is part of the historical record. In real life, she was older than Sarah; I made them the same age to deepen their evolving relationship. Aunt Joan is entirely fictional, though grounded in period-specific types of women who lived on the margins of conventional society.
How did you approach writing about intimacy in such an unconventional marriage?
With restraint and empathy, focusing on emotional nuance rather than explicit detail. The challenge was to imagine intimacy – not just sexual, but emotional and domestic – within a marriage that defied conventional boundaries. I was interested in how privacy, desire, and tenderness might emerge and endure in an arrangement shaped by constant proximity and a lack of solitude.
Why did you choose to use contractions in the novel’s language? Isn’t that historically inaccurate?
Contractions were common in 19th-century speech and informal writing. While published prose of the period tended to be more formal, I chose a narrative voice that reflects how people actually spoke. My aim was to preserve emotional immediacy and intimacy between characters while staying rooted in the rhythms and texture of the time.
Why didn’t you use dialect to represent enslaved or working-class characters?
That was a deliberate choice. Rather than risk caricature, I wanted to convey character, tone, and social status through rhythm, syntax, and word choice. Dialect on the page often reveals more about the writer’s assumptions than the character’s reality. My goal was to honor the full humanity and individuality of every voice in the novel without reducing anyone to a linguistic stereotype.
What do you hope readers take away from The Foursome?
Above all, I hope readers feel the weight of these characters’ choices – the daily negotiations between love and duty, the moments when they chose to speak rather than stay silent, to resist rather than comply. History isn’t fixed; it’s shaped by ordinary people making difficult decisions in complicated moments. I hope the novel invites reflection on the legacies we carry – those we inherit, and those we shape for ourselves.
