June and Jennifer Gibbons Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
June and Jennifer Gibbons (born April 11, 1963) were twins born to a military family from Barbados, whose story is a curious case involving psychology and language.Shortly after they were born, their family moved to Haverfordwest, Wales. The twin sisters were inseparable, and had speech impediments that made them difficult for people outside their immediate family to understand; they did not mix a great deal with other children. School was traumatic to them; they were the only children in their school of African ancestry, and eventually they were so tormented by their peers that the school administrators had to send them home early to give them a head start. Their language became even more idiosyncratic at this time, and became unintelligible to outsiders. They spoke to no one other than each other, and became even more isolated. They would complete each other's sentences and often seemed to communicate with no more than a glance or a facial expression.
When they turned 14, after a succession of therapists had tried unsuccessfully to get them to communicate with others, they were sent to separate boarding schools in an attempt to break their isolation. This was a disaster: the pair became catatonic and entirely withdrawn when parted.
When they were re-united, the two spent a couple of years engaged in elaborate play with dolls. They created many plays and stories in a sort of soap-opera style, reading some of them aloud on tape as gifts for their little sister. Inspired by a pair of gift diaries at Christmas, they embarked upon a serious self-education and writing career. They sent away for a mailorder course in creative writing, and each wrote several novels. Set primarily in the United States and particularly in Malibu, California -- an excitingly exotic locale to romantic girls trapped in an ugly Welsh town -- the stories concerned young men and women who become involved in strange and often criminal behaviour. In June's Pepsi-Cola Addict, the high-school hero is seduced by a teacher, then sent away to a reformatory where a homosexual guard makes a play for him. In Jennifer's The Pugilist, a physician is so eager to save his child's life that he kills the family dog to obtain its heart for a transplant. The dog's spirit lives on in the child and ultimately has its revenge against the father. Jennifer also wrote Discomania, the story of a young woman who discovers that the atmosphere of a local disco incites patrons to insane violence.
Their novels were published by a vanity press called New Horizons, and they made many attempts to sell stories to magazines, but were unsuccessful. A brief fling with some American boys, the sons of a U.S. Army serviceman, led nowhere. Desperate for recognition and fame (and perhaps publicity for their books), the girls committed a number of petty crimes including arson, which led to their being committed to Broadmoor, an institution for the criminally insane. There, they remained for 14 years.
Within hours after their release in 1993, Jennifer died of sudden viral myocarditis. After Jennifer's death, June became more communicative and was able to speak with other people. She has continues to write, although she describes her early books as "all over the place" and not very good. The twins were the subject of a book called The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace, and a film was made in 1987. After Wallace's book appeared, Pepsi-Cola Addict became a valuable collector's item, and the novel has been reprinted several times.
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