Double Identity: Frequently Asked Questions

Note: My answers may contain some spoilers for the book—please don’t read this if you haven’t finished the book!

How did you get the idea for this book?
I first started thinking about this book because of an article I read in the newspaper one morning over breakfast. The article was about Congress planning to ban cloning, and it quoted a bioethicist who said that cloning would give false hope and exploit the grief of parents who had lost children. What struck me most about the article was the fact that the bioethicist himself had just lost a child—his daughter had been murdered less than six months earlier. And I thought about how much he surely would have wanted to be able to bring his daughter back; I thought how hard it would be for grieving parents to resist the urge to try cloning, if it was at all possible. And then I thought, what would it be like to find out that you were the clone of a dead sibling?

Will you write a sequel to Double Identity?
I have written books that I thought were single, stand-alone books that somehow ended up being only the first in a series (which is what happened with Among the Hidden) or having companion books (which is what happened with Just Ella). I don’t really see Double Identity fitting into either of those categories, because I feel like Double Identity already told the most important parts of Bethany’s story. But, who knows? I may end up realizing there’s more to the story than I originally thought. (It did take about ten years after Just Ella before I wrote Palace of Mirrors!)