Kristen Henderson and Sarah Ellis might be in the Guiness Book of World Records. If they aren’t, they should be, because they have never met anyone else like them. Three years ago, the partners got pregnant at the same time – on the same day. They had their babies only weeks apart. Now they refer to their children – one girl, one boy – as “the twins” despite their coming from separate wombs on different days.
The dual pregnancies weren’t without struggle, though. Sarah had miscarried and struggled to become pregnant several times before she successfully carried to term. Kristen went through her own struggles as part of Antigone Rising, a band that went through several line-up changes and record labels in the midst of high-profile tours with The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith. These stories weave together in a tapestry called Times Two, Sarah and Kristen’s co-authored memoir out now from Simon & Schuster. Times Two is told from both of the women’s perspectives, beginning with their stories of being single in New York City and finding themselves whether it’s in music (Kristen) or meeting other lesbians at Henrietta Hudson (Sarah).
“You can’t just jump into the middle of someone’s story,” Sarah said. “You have to understand who they are to understand how they got where they are.”
But writing two stories at one time can prove to be a challenge. “We struggled with that because we didn’t know how we were going to write this book,” Sarah said. “Both of our brains locked on ‘How do two people write a book together?’ We came across one of those he-said/she-said type of scenarios and we didn’t know how we were going to do it. It sort of just – we started to write it. It fell out. It just happened really organically. Being first time authors, we had no idea, because we had no experience trying to write before.”
“Sarah and I are fundamentally very similar,” Kristen said. “We can usually guess what the other one will think or feel about a particular topic.”
Sarah explained that, once the two of them were together and had shared experiences, they were easily divided up as to who would write about what.
“Things just naturally belonged to one or the other one,” she said. “It was just who had the bigger experience or the bigger moment with that scene or scenario.”
“We remember almost every single detail of our pregnancies differently in the sense that she’s got a much more extreme version of how laid-back I was, and I’ve got a much more extreme version of how intense she was,” Kristen agrees. “Let’s just say it’s those differences that make the story compelling.” And it is, in part. Both women are candid about everything from the painful miscarriage Sarah endured to Kristen’s initial fear of being out, to the arguments they’d have throughout their pregnancies. Kristen said that writing the book together (which began 2 ½ months after their children were born) didn’t put any added pressure on their relationship.
“But it did certainly shine a white hot spotlight on our differences, in the sense that Sarah is extremely timeline driven,” Kristen said. “She thrives on it and was constantly aware of when things were due to the publisher. I, on the other hand, shut down at the thought of a deadline. So every time Sarah stressed out about a deadline, I tuned into a mindless episode of Wipe Out. But somehow we managed to get the book done!”
Sarah said she was able to squeeze in writing during her hour-long commute into the city from their Long Island home.
“I would just write stream-of-consciousness because Kristen is way more talented in the writing realm,” Sarah said. “She writes her own songs; she understands writing. I’m a business person. I write proposals but that’s not creative writing. And then there would be places where I’d say ‘now you need to write about your experience’ and then she would track it and color it from there.”
Kristen’s being a musician is also a large part of Times Two, and she details the highs and lows of Antigone Rising.
“Honestly, I leaned on my editor a lot to help guide and direct how much to include with regard to [the band],” Kristen said. “The primary story we were telling was how Sarah and I got pregnant on the exact same day, and what makes that relatable to women, especially in how we both struggled with fertility issues – Sarah more so than me. The band, in this case, was my secondary story.” But fans of the band will be glad to hear that Antigone Rising is releasing a new album, 23 Red in May, featuring lead singer Nini Camps, who readers will find out about in the book. And if fans didn’t know that Kristen was gay, they will learn that, too.
“For me, personally, the biggest change is the fact that I’m out now,” Kristen said. “I’m not hiding behind pronouns or conveniently leaving out parts of my life in interviews in an effort to appeal to the middle. I’m telling the truth now, and I’m being honest about my own struggles with coming out, and it seems like people really appreciate it.”
Besides her initial inability to get pregnant, Sarah also wrote about her former serious relationship with ex-partner, Sally, and Gigi, the daughter Sally conceived while they were together. Sarah said she didn’t include Sally and Gigi in the first draft, but her editor insisted she tell the full truth.
“That was, for me, the most sensitive part,” she said. “The thing is that Gigi is now 7, will be 8 in July, and so she’s way more aware of things. I never want to, on any level, threaten the relationship that I have with her or cause any challenge. It took me a while to come around to that.”
Sub-stories aside, the real focus is, indeed, on the nine months that Sarah and Kristen spent pregnant at the same time. The book was spawned from a Real Simple magazine (Sarah’s employer) feature on the women that followed them through each trimester. The writer who penned the piece told her agent about their unique situation, and he immediately took interest.
“We were eight months pregnant,” Sarah said, “so [the agent’s] wife, Sasha, who is also in the book business, wrote the proposal and did an excellent job. After the babies were born, it was right before I went back to work so they were maybe 2 ½ months old, we went and met with all these publishers. They were really interested in the book.”
For Kristen and Sarah, they hope that the final product will reach two kinds of readers. The first is, quite obviously, gay women like them who hope to have children of their own. Secondly, Sarah said, “I hope it has mainstream exposure and that it delights and surprises people that it normally wouldn’t, and that it can move the LGBT agenda forward, in terms of marriage and all of those types of things. The more you know LGBT people, the less scary they are. We are your neighbors and your friends, and that’s what our small town has proved to us.”
Now that the twins are tots, their stories continue to be told on Kristen’s blog, including the recent adoption proceedings Sarah and Kristen had to go through to legally become the mother of the one she did not conceive. “Until the twins tell me to cut it out, I do plan to keep writing and blogging about them,” Kristen said. “I think it’s important to keep stories about families like mine in the spotlight. The more people read about my average, everyday, mundane life, the more they realize we’re no different than they are. The sooner society gets that, the better off my kids lives will be.”
Times Two is about so many things, but the underlying theme is how you have to create your own happiness, even against all odds. “The dual pregnancy is probably the most unrelatable,” Sarah said, “because only .001 percent of the population will ever experience that.” But everyone can find another aspect of their story to relate to, and the rest is just awe-inspiring.
Times Two is available on April 5.
