S T A T S

A B O U T

Dominick Birdsey's identical twin, Thomas, is a paranoid schizophrenic. With proper medication, he can work at a coffee stand, but occasionally he has severe episodes. Thinking he is making a sacrificial protest that will stop the war in the Middle East, Thomas cuts off his own hand in a public library. Dominick sees him through the ensuing decision not to attempt to reattach the hand, and makes efforts on his behalf to free him from what he knows to be an inadequate and depressing hospital for the dangerous mentally ill.

In the process, Dominick reviews his own difficult life as Thomas's normal brother, his marriage to his ex-wife, which ended after their only child died of SIDS, and his ongoing hostility toward his stepfather. First in Thomas's interests, and then for his own sake, he sees a therapist, an Indian woman employed by the hospital. She helps Dominick come to understand Thomas's illness better and the family's accommodations or reactions to it in terms of the whole family system.

In the course of treatment, Dominick discovers sexual abuses taking place in the hospital and helps to expose the perpetrators. He succeeds in getting Thomas released, but Thomas soon dies, apparently suicide. After Thomas's death Dominick finds out about their birth father--a secret their mother had shared with Thomas, but not with him.

As all of this is going on, he also is reading his grandfather's life story which informs the reader a lot about the legacy of twins in their family. Using a lot of imagery of monkeys and rabbits, Dominick learns a lot about himself and his mother through learning about his grandfather.

He also learns that his live-in girlfriend has been letting a man she's been seeing on the side in the room with him during intercourse and that she is HIV-positive. She asks him to keep her baby if she dies. At first he resists, but later, having found his way back into a relationship with his wife, takes the baby. The book ends with several healing events that leave Dominick able to cope with the considerable loss, failure, and sadness in his personal and family history.

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