Analyse af Anne Haydens novelle 'Same same but different'

What are you supposed to do if you lose your twin sister, your other half? Losing someone that close is probably one of the most terrifying things you can go through. Life goes on, but it’s often hard for the heart to follow. This is what happens in Anne Hayden’s short story, Same same but different. Our main character finds it hard to deal with her loss, especially when you look just like your sister who passed away.

This story starts in media res with our main character sitting at a bar, which means that we are sort of rushed into the story. It is written from a first-person narrator perspective. So, because of that perspective, we get a lot of information about how she feels about things. You can say that we are sort of inside her head, because we see things from her point of view. That also means that situations get affected by her feelings and thoughts. For example, on page 1, line 3-6: “I’m nodding away to the sound of Bros and smiling to myself, he probably thinks I’m being ironic or something. Molly would have been so much better at this online dating thing”. In this situation, she is sitting at a bar with some online date that she found, and it doesn’t really seem like she’s is interested in him. She ends up leaving the date. She’s got her head somewhere else, and as the reader you can sense how she’s constantly thinking about Molly, “ we used to sing it at a karaoke bar called Same Same but different during the summer in New York, her on lead vocals, me on barking” (ll. 8-9). The short story contains several flashbacks. Our main character tells us about things she experienced with Molly in the past, and also how Molly’s death has affected her so far. The flashbacks give us a chance to understand her situation. With every flashback we get, and the longer we get into the short story, the more we understand and know what she’s going through, and also how much her life has changed since Molly’s death. As we move forward in the story, we get to see the conflict our narrator is dealing with. She finds it hard to accept and talk about her death. Because of that, she even avoids mentioning her, and speak of her as a friend: “it wasn’t my friend, actually it was molly who was the culprit, but I don’t mention that because then he’d say something like “ oh, you have a twin sister” and I’d have to either lie or explain things” (ll. 22-24). She is trying to break free from the shadow of her dead sister. I can see this story in the 7 stages of grief model. This model is built up by the seven stages: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing and acceptance. In the beginning of the story, we find out that molly, her twin sister is dead, and this is the shock. The second stage is denial. It’s here our main character tries to escape the reality by changing her look so that people wouldn’t think of molly when they saw her. The third stage is anger. This is where our character collects bottled up emotions “…it’s not my fault but I still feel guilty sometimes, simply for the fact that I’m alive and she’s not.” (ll. 71-72). In the fourth stage, bargaining, she is seeking for a way out by moving herself across the world “it’s not as simple as it sounds, though, escaping the past. Even when you put yourself on the other side of the world” (ll. 8-9). The fifth stage depression is where she realizes what has happened, and where she suddenly ends up having no friends in Australia, because she feels so off. At the sixth stage, testing, our character is sort of seeking realistic solutions. She dyes her hair back to her normal color and thinks about contacting her mom to tell her about it. In this stage she is slowly coming back to herself again. The final stage, acceptance, is where she finally finds peace with the loss. She used to lie about her being the only child in the family, but in the end she ends up telling her date Luke about it. “Well I had a twin sister” I tell him. “but she passed away”. This is where she finally accepts what happened, and now she can begin to move forward in life and let go.