What's your doppelganger up to?
I recently finished Naomi Klein’s excellent book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Frustrated by years of being confused with 90s feminist darling turned right wing conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, Klein takes a deep dive into what she calls the mirror world to try to make sense of Wolf’s head-spinning trajectory. Along the way, Klein explores the doppelganger in myth, literature, and psychoanalysis. As she discovers, any investigation into a supposed doppelganger is really an invitation to look closely at yourself.
It wouldn’t be a Naomi Klein book if it didn’t give me a lot to think about in terms of questions about branding, consumerism, climate change, and even Palestine. It also made me ponder whether I have a doppelganger and in what sense (someone who looks like me? Has a similar name?). In some of the doppelganger stories Klein writes about, like Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, the doppelganger appears and begins to steal the protagonist’s life. I recalled that I used to have someone who I felt was living the life I was supposed to live. We don’t look alike, and no, she has never impersonated me! But for a time, she seemed to have everything I wanted and felt I deserved.
We met in our undergraduate women’s studies classes in the mid-90s. Let me call her D (for doppelganger). We were close for a time, although she had a tendency to ghost, before ghosting was called ghosting. Graduate school beckoned both of us, but I took a detour: I had a baby just a year or so after graduation. I remember being reluctant to tell her I was pregnant. It was such a departure from what I expected to happen at that point in my life, and would certainly send us on divergent paths.
As it went, our paths didn’t so much diverge as become staggered, with D just a few steps ahead of me. We both did masters degrees and then PhDs at the same two institutions, not quite overlapping with each other but within the same orbit. Toronto is a small big city in many ways, so even when we weren’t actively in touch, it was easy to be aware of what she was up to. We would also occasionally bump into each other in random spots, such as a ferry in the Toronto harbour.
D and I had similar research interests and politics. We knew many of the same people. We clearly had the same career ambitions, too.
I noticed that she was starting to accrue the kinds of things that felt just out of reach to me: a prestigious grant, a certain publication, eventually a tenure-track job at one of those Toronto institutions. I was never going to catch up to her, it seemed. My PhD took forever; the job market took a dive when I graduated; I was a long way from a job at my alma mater. I didn’t think about her that often, but when I did, I wondered: Why her? Why not me?
I’m not irrational enough to believe that D, in any way, stole these things from me. But in a career context where the right kinds of accolades are rare and secure jobs are few, it can easily feel like one person’s win is your loss. We’d been so similar once … it didn’t seem fair that she had the exact career trajectory I so wished was mine. What if I hadn’t taken that time away to have a baby? Would her path have been mine instead?
I would love to say that I eventually caught up to her and claimed “mine.” By the prestige-oriented metrics of modern academia, though, that would not be true. She’s a full professor at a major research institution. I just quit my job.
I have no idea what D’s life look likes up close. I know that no one approaches 50 without experiencing loss, heartbreak, rejection, stress, regret. So I have no illusions that she has somehow “won” this contest she has no idea she was ever in. All of this thinking about doppelgangers that Klein’s book sparked has, though, given me occasion to reflect on the fact that many of us have someone out there whose life is just a slightly refracted version of our own. It’s almost impossible not to make comparisons, or wonder, what if?
As Klein found, the meaning of the doppelganger isn’t found by examining the double more closely. It’s in interrogating yourself. What are your desires, especially the ones you don’t like to admit to? What are your regrets? What choices led you to the life you have?
Do you have a double out there, living “your” life or some fun house mirror version of it? What does it tell you about yourself?
What I’m reading: Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, by Dani Shapiro.
What I’m watching: Late to the party, but I’m hooked on Foundation.