Bernstein, Paula 1968-

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Bernstein, Paula 1968-

PERSONAL:

Born October 9, 1968, in New York, NY; married; children: two daughters. Education: Earned a degree from Wellesley College and a master's degree from New York University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Brooklyn, NY. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER:

Freelance writer. Also worked as reporter for Variety and the Hollywood Reporter and as a regular contributor on CNN.

AWARDS, HONORS:

New York Chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society's 2007 Books for a Better Life Award in the psychology category.

WRITINGS:

(With Elyse Schein) Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited, Random House (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, Village Voice, New York Observer, and Redbook.

SIDELIGHTS:

Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited is a joint memoir written by Paula Bernstein and her identical twin sister, Elyse Schein. The authors recount that shortly after their birth in New York City, they were placed in separate adoptive homes. Each lived unaware of the other's existence until the age of thirty-five, when Schein, living a bohemian life in Paris and aspiring to a career in filmmaking, launched a search for her birth parents. She contacted the adoption agency that placed her, and that contact led her to a reunion with her sister.

Bernstein and Schein provide details about the circumstances surrounding their separation and the motives behind it. To their shock they discovered that they were part of a dubious psychological experiment. With the collusion of a well-respected New York City adoption agency that facilitated the girls' placement in adoptive homes, child psychiatrists were using the girls, and others, to conduct an experiment examining the relative effects of nature and nurture by separating identical twins and having them raised by adoptive parents who were unaware that the child they adopted had a twin. In this way, the psychiatrists believed, they could keep the hereditary aspects of personality development separate from the environmental influences to measure the relative impact of each. Additionally, the authors learned, the psychiatrists wanted to study the hereditary aspects of mental illness. Because the girls' mother was schizophrenic, they seemed like ideal candidates for the study. Ironically, during the 1980s Bernstein began to experience depression and reflected at the time that she believed her natural mother would have understood what she was feeling. Bernstein also said that she was never interested in locating her natural parents, and in fact had written an article titled "Why I Don't Want to Find My Birth Mother."

Throughout the memoir, Bernstein and Schein discuss their evolving relationship as they came to know one another. They recount some of the preferences they share, such as their love for writing, as well as mannerisms and personality traits. Beyond that, they use their memoir to reflect on the very issues the child psychiatrists were attempting to study. Some of those issues include the relative influences of nature and nurture, what it means to be a person, what makes a sister, and what constitutes a family. The result was what Gersh Kuntzman, a contributor for the Brooklyn Paper Online, called a "stunning" book and that a Publishers Weekly critic called "transfixing."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bernstein, Paula, and Elyse Schein, Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited, Random House (New York, NY), 2007.

PERIODICALS

Glamour, November, 2007, "‘I Met My Identical Twin—at 35!,’" p. 207.

New York, October 22, 2007, "Sliding Doors: Identical Twins Tell a Shocking Story of Adoption Gone Awry—and How Two Strangers Became Sisters," p. 90.

People, October 22, 2007, "Twins Reunited," p. 111.

Publishers Weekly, April 18, 2005, "Twins and Strangers," p. 14; August 27, 2007, review of Identical Strangers, p. 78.

School Library Journal, December, 2007, Lynn Rashid, review of Identical Strangers, p. 163.

Science News, November 3, 2007, review of Identical Strangers, p. 287.