By Teresa Robertson (Mensch Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-912914-96-8 (TPB), 978-1-912914-97-5 (Digital edition)
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Cosy, Happy, Sad and Charming …8/10
Once upon a time Comics as a medium was the playground of cartoonists being funny and/or socially relevant when not acting as an arena of action and spectacle in traditional genres offering transient thrills. Now, with the advent – and popular acceptance – of Graphic Novels, we have expanded those parameters and have broached the literary end of storytelling at last.
That’s especially true of the form when used to tell extended slow-burning generational sagas or share autobiographical and historical tales where apparently not much happens. Of course, such appearances are so often remarkably deceiving…
Teresa Robertson is an artist, designer, portraitist and storyteller whose clients range from civic bodies like Haringey Council and The British Council to publishers like SelfMadeHero or current home Mensch. She also self-publishes and has an MA in children’s book illustration. Although coming relatively late to comics, Robertson was a finalist for the John Ruskin Prize in 2015; exhibited in The Inking Woman event at the Cartoon Museum (London, 2017) and was shortlisted for the Observer Cape short graphic story competition prize (for ‘Dying’ and ‘Tarquin’).
A child of the post-war person boom, Robertson grew up with successfully artistic (not to say theatrically Bohemian) parents as part of an large, well-off middle-class family comprising and including many sets of twins. She and her own twin brother Adam grew up through the social cauldron of 1960s and 1970s Britain, and their lives form the spine of this quietly compelling personal journey of loss and acceptance.
They survived the Grammar vs Comprehensive school wars; unsettled, nomadic homelife; bullying; Punk; The Long Hot Summer; Art/drama schools; low-paid, enforced freelancing and The Eighties, all the while seeking to achieve their most cherished goals. For Teresa that translated not to career success but to lasting love, having children and what she dubbed “The Husband Quest!”…
How that all came about is framed against a nigh-mystical relationship, attachment to and dependence on brother Adam and takes a most shocking turn when he dies in a (long-prophesied) motorbike accident just as Teresa is finally having her first child.
… And no, that is not a spoiler, it’s the entire point and narrative engine of this book…
Subdivided into more-or-less chronological chapters, the tale’s players are first introduced in pictorial prologue ‘The Odds Were Stacked Against’ before it all unfolds as a genteel, gently unfolding family drama initially exploring ‘Privilege’ with the twins growing up benefitting from the larger clan’s ‘Magic Money’.
For the sake of the parents’ gainful employment and advancement, the twins then experience working class life (and learn a new language!) in Nottingham – at a Secondary Modern Comprehensive school!!! – via ‘Mundella’ Eventually, though, she returns to a kind of comfort zone after transferring to London and attending ‘Camden School for Girls’…
Part of that growth and shaping was anticipating the future, with that era and the college experience that follows tackled in ‘The Husband Quest’ with dalliances, mistakes and close calls encompassing ‘Tarquin’, ‘Nick’, ‘Ian’, and ‘Quentin & the Davids’ before at long, long last settling with poet/future husband ‘John’ and his ready-made family…
Always, Adam is there when needed, as she is for him: sharing feelings and notions in a bond non-twins cannot grasp. But one day he’s not there anymore…
This begins what Teresa deems the second half of her life, filled with solo-derived decisions, new coping mechanisms, fresh ventures, rationalisations, different directions and ultimately a continuing of the family line… including the arrival of more twins. As she sees it in 2016 “28 years a twin, 28 years a mother”…
Incidentally, I’m a product of those same years and seem to have reached what I’ll coyly define as “maturity” by overlapping many moments – except the twinning. My experience although scarily similar – Teresa was rejected just like I was by the Same Art School in the same year (and aren’t they looking foolish now?) – has led to vastly different outcomes. Of course it has. However, a current saying goes “Boomers were all feral” and we were, but this account proves that the force, bonds and power of family as much as events and personal choices are the shaper of destinies…
Also seen in this beguilingly gripping, painfully sad yet warmly affirming account of life as it happened is a copious Picture gallery of many of the folk involved plus a hefty Creator Biography & acknowledgements section.
Sharing good days and bad, traveling through harsher, kinder, sadder and just plain different times, Twins – a Memoir is decidedly different from mainstream comic fare and a book you’ll want to read if you’re over 50. It is also one you NEED to read if you’re a callow youth who has those in your life who are… or just love comics.
© Teresa Robertson 2026. All rights reserved.