NEW YORK – One afternoon in August 2020, while staying at her parents’ house in New York’s Hudson Valley, Jean Garnett, an editor at Little, Brown & Co, prepared to meet remotely with author Chantal Johnson, whose novel Post-Traumatic she wanted to acquire for publication.

She had to find a private place to take the call not because she needed quiet, but because her identical twin sister Callie Garnett – editorial director at Bloomsbury, a competing imprint – was also staying at the house and would be taking her own call with Johnson a few hours later.

Jean ended up working in her father’s office, while Callie hunkered down in a bedroom.

“I went to the bathroom while she was on the call, and I heard her being brilliant,” Jean recalled in an interview in December at a German beer hall in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighbourhood.

She was sitting on a bar stool next to her sister as a publishing industry holiday party was winding down.

Callie, wearing an olive-green trapper hat, smiled as her sister told the story, then delivered the punchline: “But Jean got the book.”

At the event, an annual soiree hosted by literary agent Soumeya Roberts and Grove Atlantic deputy publisher Peter Blackstock, everyone knew Callie from Jean and vice versa.

But at a reading a few hours earlier, Callie said, more than one person had approached her to say, “I know you’re one of the twins, but I don’t know which one”.

“That happens a lot,” Callie added.

Such is occasionally the cost of doing business when you work in the same tight-knit industry as your identical twin. Turns out, Jean said, mix-ups are “really good for networking”.

Post-Traumatic was not the only project that enticed both Garnetts.

Each chased Enter The Aardvark, a political satire by Jessica Anthony (Jean won); Outlawed by Anna North (Callie won); and Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej (Callie won again, and Songsiridej later earned a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation for the novel).

Jean said that when she started reading Little Rabbit on submission, “within five pages, I was, like, Callie is going to be all over this”.

“Sometimes, we just know,” she added.

Rachel Mannheimer, an editor at The Yale Review, walked over to chat with Jean about a forthcoming essay on midlife crisis. She and Callie had turned 40 at the beginning of the month.

The sisters are also writers, and Mannheimer is Jean’s editor at the Review.

“I send all of my work to Rachel,” Jean said. She edited There I Almost Am, Jean’s Pushcart Prize-winning essay on coping with jealousy and comparison as a twin, published in 2021.

“Writing about the ways I’m envious of my twin was very freeing,” Jean said. “It made me more fully grasp the love and identification side of envy. Which twins are a useful symbol of.”

That same year, Callie’s first poetry collection, Wings In Time, appeared on The New York Times’ list of Best Poetry.

In July, Jean wrote about their relationship again in a New Yorker piece called Giving Away My Twin, which recounted her experience walking Callie down the aisle at her wedding.

The twins, who live in Hudson Valley, grew up in Park Slope. As tweens and teens, Callie said, they “did a lot of thrashing around trying to individuate”. But as they got older, she added, they realised that they “didn’t really have to force that”.

“We were enough of our own people that we could really share the things we loved”, like writing and editing, Callie said. Jean got into publishing first and, in 2014, connected Callie with George Gibson, then the head of Bloomsbury.

“Jean is responsible for me being in publishing,” Callie said. “And for me getting my first job. I’ve been at Bloomsbury my whole career.”

To create a place where, as Jean put it, they “weren’t in competition as editors”, she started a joint Instagram account under the handle @publishingtwins in 2021. She and Callie have since used it to celebrate each other’s successes and to boost each other’s titles.

In November, Callie published Helena de Bres’ book How To Be Multiple: The Philosophy Of Twins, which grapples with existential questions related to twinship and society’s perception of it.

De Bres, a professor at Wellesley College and a twin herself, said in an interview that many identical twins end up in the same fields. For example, US politicians Julian and Joaquin Castro; tennis doubles champions Bob and Mike Bryan; The National band members Aaron and Bryce Dessner; and the feuding Danish beer brewers Mikkel Borg Bjergso and Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergso.

When the average person encounters a pair of twins, de Bres said, it is easy to start thinking about “free will, or the nature of love, or what it means to be a person, what identity is”.

What de Bres did, Callie said, is explore questions such as “which one are you?”

“Who’s the smart one?’ Jean chimed in. “Who’s the good one?”

“Are you two in love?” Callie continued. “I loved that one. Because people really do project a weird romance between twins. I think that’s why identical twins are a little threatening to people. They have a closeness.” NYTIMES