Leah Dieterich's essays and short fiction have been published by Buzzfeed, BOMB, The Nervous Breakdown, and The Offing. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.
Praise for Vanishing Twins Shortlisted for the 2019 Pacific
Northwest Book Award
Named a Best Book of Fall by NYLON
"It's exactly this tension between retaining your individuality and
absorbing yourself into someone else that unfurls throughout
Vanishing Twins . . . Her writing is crisp and intelligent, she
relies on architecture, Greek mythology and even language to place
her relationship in the context of a wider world . . . Dieterich
maintains her searching, inquisitive voice throughout Vanishing
Twins. She writes about her own reckoning with her sexuality and
exploration of queer identity without becoming pat or coy, giving
readers intimate access to her fears and conflicting emotions."
--NPR "Leah Dieterich's memoir, Vanishing Twins, is filled with
that specific sharp agony; it echoes with longing, vibrates with
the effort Dieterich undergoes as she pushes the boundaries of who
she is, both as an individual and within the context of her
marriage. Within both realms--the individual and the
partnered--Dieterich explores what it means to have options and to
choose one thing over another; she and her husband open their
marriage, and she explores what it means to expand and maintain
connections to another person and to herself. All of this
exploration is done in the kind of beautifully written fragments
that lodge inside you after reading, so that you carry these
thoughts around inside of you, exploring the themes until they
become, if not your own, then something shared, and elevated,
because of it." --NYLON "In many ways, Dieterich's provocative,
poetic memoir is about wanting more than what we--particularly as
women--are told we can have. It is a meditation on openness and
constraints, on partnership and absence, and it hinges on
Dieterich's experience of a period of polyamory within her
marriage, a time during which both she and her husband explored
relationships with other partners while also staying tethered to
one another. But it is also a book about making choices, and
knowing that those decisions are best made after thoroughly
exploring the available options, and also fully getting to know
ourselves in the process." --NYLON "A gorgeous portrait of marriage
that is searching, fractured, [and] humane." --Marina Benjamin, New
Statesman, One of the Books of the Year "Vanishing Twins is more
than a memoir about love and marriage. It's a literary experiment
in both structure and subject, a novel mix of theory and story."
--Rebecca Schuh, Bookforum "Dieterich's book tells us there isn't
any one way to create a sexual life and I'm grateful for that
invitation . . . [Her] voice is inviting, the prose simple and
confident and I found myself thinking of the narrator while I was
away, making connections between my own life and hers. Twinning,
you might say." --Entropy "Is 'magical' too big a word to describe
this memoir? No, it isn't. In this ethereal yet psychologically
astute memoir, Dieterich analyzes the story of her life--from
aspirations as a ballerina, to her work in advertising, to her
experiment in an open marriage--through the lens of her search for
her missing metaphorical twin. Vanishing Twins is composed in
short, often page-long chapters that each sear powerful images
about love, monogamy, and what we ask of the people in our lives,
onto the mind." --Refinery29 "As Leah Dieterich beautifully
explores in her new memoir Vanishing Twins, an open relationship
can allow two individuals to make room to discover who they truly
are--within and outside of a relationship." --Bustle "Her book is a
dance, moving adroitly through brief, philosophical, and
thought-provoking fragments." --Bustle "Vanishing Twins paints a
portrait of Leah Dieterich's open marriage and offers meditations
on love, sexuality, and identity. You'll devour this honest memoir
that beautifully broaches subjects we don't talk about enough."
--Hello Giggles "A mesmerizing story that merges fluidity and
structure, your mind floats through waiting for more. It is
reminiscent of Maggie Nelson, Leslie Jamison, and Sarah Manguso . .
. It's a book that you will keep following along to see Leah's next
move." --Girls at Library "In such disintegration lies room for
redefinition, and Dieterich describes that messy process with a
level of intimacy that often amounts to bravery. The marriage at
the heart of Vanishing Twins may snap back into its original shape
eventually, but from the inside it feels bigger than before."
--Lambda Literary "Vanishing Twins is a stark commentary on social
norms and expectations, choosing to fully delve into these subjects
as a whole rather than focus on singular experience . . . Timely
and vital . . . A stunning and fascinating narrative that delivers
a startlingly touching blow." --Popscure "Like the great essayists,
[Dieterich's] probing mind struggles to understand itself, and she
makes fascinating connections between a range of subjects from pop
culture to psychology to literature to help figure out who she is
and what she wants. Vanishing Twins is a powerful, poetic memoir,
both emotive and cerebral, that casts new light on the familiar
issue of relationships, marriage and storytelling, and vividly
articulates some of the most subtle aspects of human relationships
in a way many readers will recognize in themselves." --Longreads "A
perspective on marriage and relationships that cannot be
categorized. I have referred to it so many times since I finished
the book. Read this if you want to redefine the humanness of being
in a relationship." --Eliza Wexleman, MyDomaine, One of the Best
Books of the Year "Leah Dieterich's stunning memoir Vanishing Twins
is a poignant exploration of identity and open marriage, and one of
the year's most thought-provoking books." --Largehearted Boy "Are
you fascinated by twins? I know I am, and in pop culture, twins
have always occupied a unique space. When Leah Dieterich began
researching Vanishing Twin Syndrome, a gestational illness in which
one fetus absorbs another fetus, she realized that this idea really
resonated with her as she approached nonmonogamy in her marriage.
Intimate memoirs are sometimes difficult to pull off, but
Dieterich's marriage with Eric and partnership with Elena is really
captivating." --Bitch Reads "A quick and thought-provoking read . .
. In the end, Vanishing Twins reads as a love letter--a testament
to two people who love and respect each other enough to give each
other space to explore, make mistakes, and grow." --Gertrude Press
"Dieterich chronicles her romantic life in this intimate and
passionate memoir, which focuses on the link between identity and
love. . . . The narrative . . . is seamless, as she traverses a
period of uncertainty and questioning into comfortably claiming her
queer identity." --Publishers Weekly "In this ethereal and heady
memoir, Dieterich paints a stunning portrait of her marriage and
her lifelong search for twinship. . . . Poignant and extremely hard
to shake." --Booklist "Dieterich fully embraces the art of
introspection in this unique memoir. Her prose, dispatched in
pagelong ruminations, establishes thought-provoking connections . .
. In these poetically written episodes, the author ponders the
nature of love, attraction, and identity through literature, pop
culture, psychology, femininity, and the delicate nuances of being
a 'beautiful and controlled' ballerina. Graceful snapshots of a
life that lyrically coalesce into expressive declarations of
identity and intimacy. --Kirkus Reviews "Dieterich is unfailingly
open to her own curiosities, which makes for an engaging read . . .
The instinctual nature of Dieterich's exploration is the charm of
her voice and narrative style, reflecting the motions of the
ballets she loves, reflecting her way of dancing with vocabulary,
turning words around and around until she spins out from them. This
is an artist's memoir as much as it is a writer's--she plays with
image, language, and ornamentation in ways that are as much for
sheer aesthetic pleasure as they are to further the narrative, and
yet she keeps the narrative feeling lean and necessary." --Eve
Ettinger, The Adroit Journal "The themes in Vanishing Twins are at
once timeless and contemporary: what does it mean to be both wife
and artist, both partner and individual? Leah Dieterich's singular
explorations of these ideas paired with her sharp, nimble sentences
made it impossible for me to put this book down." --Chelsea Hodson,
author of Tonight I'm Someone Else "I'm captivated by Dieterich's
naive but searching and intelligent narrator; the connections she
ties between typography and twinning and ballet and sex are
unexpected and frequently magical. I love this book." --Sarah
Manguso, author of 300 Arguments and Two Kinds of Decay
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