Twin A: A Memoir

by Amit Majmudar

Shortly after learning they would become the parents of twins, the physician-writer Amit Majmudar and his wife received a devastating in utero one of the twins had a potentially fatal congenital heart defect. Written in the form of an extended letter, Twin A recounts the epic story of the open-heart surgeries, complications, and prolonged recoveries that Majmudar's son survived in infancy and early childhood. But the narrative turns into something much richer and more expansive than the mere description of a surgical history. Thanks to Majmudar's ample gifts as a wordsmith, medical and scientific information frequently give way to original poetry and fables, family history, and a series of evocative religious and philosophical reflections about matters of life and death. The result is a fresh, captivating exploration of the events that transform his son and everyone around him. Drawing strength and beauty from catastrophe, Majmudar's Twin A creates a moving portrait of a family's love and a child's extraordinary resilience.

206 pages, Paperback

Published August 15, 2023

About the author

Amit Majmudar is the author of The Abundance, Partitions, chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best debut novels of 2011 and by Booklist as one of the year’s ten best works of historical fiction. His poetry has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Best American Poetry 2011. A radiologist, he lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Reviews

[Neelam Shah · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a poignant love letter from a father to a son, detailing the early years of a child’s journey battling a congenital heart defect.

After a long time, I finally found a book that I was so invested in and could not put down.

A must-read of anyone who is taking care of family member with an illness, for anyone who is dealing with or part of the medical system, anyone questioning the role of spirituality in our lives.

There were many sentences and passages I read over and over. The author is masterful with his craft (as evidenced by his other works) but it’s really the personal and raw rendition of his family’s experience that takes this latest book to a whole new level. This one will stay with me for a while.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so glad I read this. What a memoir it is. It is the story of the twins born to the author, poet, physician and his spouse and the grave illness one of those children carried. He writes with compassion, brevity, power, guilt, all of these things. I guess he mainly writes with wonder and mystery.