The imaginary friend in a novel - Icarus Girl

Published in 2005, this story is about an imaginary friend. (Evidently a lost twin, but but seemingly none of the readers or reviewers got that. Of course that was seven years ago and a lot has happened since then ........)

From the guardian:

The Icarus Girl
by Helen Oyeyemi
280pp, Bloomsbury, £16.99

The Icarus Girl, a debut novel completed when its author was still at school, begins innocently, with a childish debate about identity. An eight-year-old girl is hiding in a cupboard "saying quietly to herself, I am in the cupboard. She felt that she needed to be saying this so that it would be real. It was similar to her waking up and saying to herself, My name is Jessamy. I am eight years old." Jessamy likes to amend her favourite children's classics by writing new versions over their pages with her pen: "Beth's so nice you'd think Louisa May Alcott would have treated her better." It turns out that she herself is the heroine of an unalterable hurt narrative, her tale of herself and her imaginary friend, which twists into a new version of the doppelgänger myth, the myth of the fetch, the fateful twin. It's a story with an eye for the baroque state that childhood can be and on the damage that cultural fracture inflicts on everybody, no matter how young or old.

Ghost story or lost twin story?

The feeling of one's twin being near is very common among womb twin survivors:-  watching over you, part of your life; keeping you from harm; a guardian angel.  If you don't know about womb twin survivors and the possibility of being one yourself, then this must be a ghost, for what else can it be?

Here is a story written by someone who sounds like a womb twin survivor, thinks like a womb twin survivor, shares similar feelings with many other womb twin survivors and therefore probably is a womb twin survivor herself:

I wasn't a lonely child EVER but I still felt like I was missing someone so important. A strong bond I had with someone who wasn't there? I'd never lost anyone at that age though, I thought. When I'd go to bed at night I'd look down at the empty bed with such a broken heart, almost crying and I'd think to myself "Why isn't she there?" Even to this day I still have serious issues sleeping. And a lot of times I just don't feel whole, like I lost such an important part of me.

Imaginary friends

They have been talking about imaginary friends on the radio, and saying it's normal to have one.
Listen here


Dr. Karen Majors 
Community Psychology Service, Barking and Dagenham

It used to be thought that children with imaginary friends were in the minority. It has sometimes been assumed that children had imaginary friends because they were lonely and lacked real friends. Perhaps this is why some parents and others may show concern when a child has an imaginary friend, particularly once they have started school, and older children and adolescents tend to keep their imaginary friends a secret. Imaginary companions or friends have certainly been a misunderstood phenomenon. There has been surprisingly little research about imaginary friends. Consequently there has been little information about how many children have imaginary friends, what the imaginary friends are like and why children have them. Recent research has been providing some surprising answers to some of these questions. Firstly, there is now clear evidence that imaginary friends are a common feature in childhood development. Did you have an imaginary friend?  Was your imaginary friend your lost twin?  Is he or she still there, sharing your life? I wonder if this researcher has thought about this reason for having an imaginary friend?  I would guess not. ( Just realised that 60% of the people who completed my research questionnaire in 2008/9 had an imaginary friend.)