Twin Lights

"Doctor," whispered Sister Giovanni with a sense of urgency

as the tiny newborn infant slipped into her outstretched hands,

"I think there's another one!"




Twin Lights was written to help a father imagine a very different version of his life had his premature twin sons lived and been his only children. Michael Charles and Mark Edward Dowdle were born at five-and-a-half months' gestation in Perham, Minnesota on August 9, 1953, each weighing a pound and a half. The twins died an hour apart the following day. When Dowdle was 83 years old, he began pondering the question of what that life might have looked like, a life with twin sons and no daughters. That question was answered when he finished writing Twin Lights in 2021 at the age of 93.