doppelganger

double trouble

Mar 18, 2025

Last year I got a text from a friend1

Do you get a lot of “you look like Chappell roan”? Yet?

I replied

Hah! Not once. I don’t know many people.

But a few months later in Salem, Oregon after I asked a young bartender for some water, she gave it to me and sheepishly said “Has anyone told you that you look just like Chappell Roan?”

Then, a few months after that, as I checked out at Trader Joe’s, the effusively friendly checkout guy said “I was watching you shop around because you look just like Chappell Roan!”2

So there you have it. I guess Chappell Roan is my celebrity doppelganger3! Who is yours?

The idea of the doppelganger4 is very ‘descent in madness’ coded and appears often in myth, folklore and literature. The Egyptian ka is a tangible "spirit double" having the same memories and feelings as the person to whom the counterpart belongs and its said that someone seeing their double predicts their death5. These stories usually grow from unsettling to terrifying as they play with all sorts of imagery like mirrors and mimics. Think Black Swan.

The doppelganger trope allows for explorations into identity and the self, madness and reality, truth and the performance of life along with individual vs the duality of consciousness. The doppelganger is often a version of the ‘evil twin’, someone who is everything the ‘original’ is not which provides a rich playground for all sorts of dilemmas and scary situations. There’s the shock of discovery, then the realizations of what is similar and what is different followed by a compulsive obsession and, by the end, usually only one survives.

While writing up this post I came across a BBC article from last year: Why we're 'living in the golden age of the doppelganger' which I thought was a fun synchronicity.

It's been a year of lookalikes – but the lure of the "second self" goes way back to the folklore of the Irish "fetch" and the Nordic "fylgja", and to the writings of Edgar Allen Poe and Sigmund Freud.

Today’s books are all about encountering one’s double; the meaning, possibilities and nightmares that occur when one is forced interrogate and reflect upon the true nature of the self and the other. Especially when the other may not be so other after all.

Avoid reflective surfaces, hold tight to your one true self and leave Chappell Roan alone as you dip into the double life with one of these.

THE BODY DOUBLE by Emily Beyda

Our nameless narrator is plucked from her bleak, small town existence when she is hired by Max, the personal assistant to the famous movie star Rosanna Feld. A secret nervous breakdown has forced Rosanna to take refuge behind the walls of her mountain mansion so Max needs someone to impersonate her to keep up contractual obligations and make sure she doesn’t stray too far from the public’s attention. So, our narrator is installed in an isolated, shabby LA apartment and tasked with becoming Rosanna. As she immerses herself in everything Rosanna over weeks and months with only Max for company, the line between the person and impersonator begins to blur. When she learns there may be more to Rosanna and Max than she was told, she decides to take matters into her own hands. After all, who knows Rosanna better than her body double?

I loved how Rebecca-esque this was from the very first line: “Someone speaks my name”. As in Rebecca, we never find out the narrator’s name as we witness her fall under an absent woman’s thrall. Also like Rebecca, we get Max6 — a man pulled between both women, an anchor for them for better or worse. This book had a Hitchcock essence that I loved with loads of erasure language as our poor, blank slate of a narrator slowly goes through a metamorphosis, deleting herself to embody ~~Rebecca~~ Rosanna7. She is utterly at Max’s mercy and it is deliciously unnerving to witness her pitiful desperation to please as she’s used, controlled and manipulated8 during her secluded study to memorize and inhabit Rosanna.

I adore a good ‘sanity on the edge’ tale and this builds a terrific atmospheric dread and a growing madness as the ‘fabric of reality begins to fray’ for our narrator. The psychological games were eerie, unsettling and bizarre— stacking up the suspense as sanity teetered. We the reader aren’t always sure what is real or not when things get dreamier and less tangible for our main character as she deals with themes of obsession, power, control, dominance vs submission, identity and the price of beauty before we arrive at a chilling finale that asks how well we can know our own selves. I also quite enjoyed the imagery of the narrator’s courtyard populated with parrots. She is an impersonator surrounded by mimics.

I step back from the mirror and turn off the light. I disappear. Rosanna's face swims into focus, like a deep-sea fish emerging from dark water. I can finally see what Max saw at the beginning. What Rosanna understands. Our correspondence. The way her face is hidden beneath my own, like an ancient fresco waiting to be dug up from the ash.

I put my hands up to my face, her face, close enough that I can feel the warmth of my skin, the hair tickling my fingertips. I do not touch the surface, afraid it will smear. It is the strangest feeling. Part of me is terrified. I want to wipe my new face off, to leave the room, the apartment, all this, to take my old self back. I can be gone before Max returns, disappearing into this vast city, making a life of my own. I can still leave. I don't have to let myself disappear.

Looking at Rosanna's face in the mirror, I know all this, and yet... and yet it is wonderful, too.

THE PUNCH ESCROW by Tal M. Klein

It is the year 2147 and technology has improved most aspects of life with the recent invention of teleportation creating the ‘ideal mode of transport’. Joel is a basic bro9 who spends his days training AI to become more human10 and struggling to re-connect with his wife whose new top secret job at International Transport has caused some marital strain.11 In an attempt to rekindle their relationship, they book a weekend getaway across the world, but during the teleportation process (colloquially called punching) Joel is accidentally duplicated. Joel must outwit global conglomerates, escape religious fanatics and confront his double to save himself (himselves?) and his marriage. Just as soon as he decides which one of him is the true Joel.

With a fun and thought provoking premise, this is entertaining though never brilliant. Its technically advanced world is creative and presents some truly mind boggling, ethical and existential quandaries that can stick with you. The chapters are snappy, quick and usually end with a cliffhanger keeping you invested and, though Joel is a bumbler, he’s got some fun snark and a nice character evolution. There are elements of escapism but also relatability as we’ve got some batshit crazy tech bros with delusions of grandeur intent on taking over everything12, extreme fundamentalists intent on attacking teleportation which they view as “the unnatural acts of suicide and re-creation”, and the everyday annoyances that appear in an increasingly tech dependent world. Full of quantum paradoxes, nanobots and numerous opportunities for the reader to channel Dr. Ian Malcom13, this is nerdy, frothy sci fi fun that while, not very intellectual or incisive, is an enjoyable ride with a truly mind bending premise that incites great food for thought. Plus the author is a fellow footnote fiend14.

Imagine looking in the mirror and not knowing who you are. An empty face staring back. No one … We always imagine what it would be like to be someone else, but when we do so, it’s with the guise that beneath it all, we know who we really are. Take that away, and who are we?

THE SCAPEGOAT by Daphne du Maurier

John is solo British traveler on the last leg of his vacation in France, sipping a drink while wallowing in self-pity at his outsider identity, when he encounters himself. Well, his double. Jean de Gué is a gregarious French family man with a nearby country estate, so is everything John is not. After they spend the evening marveling over their alikeness and partaking of a bit too much drink, John awakens to find that Jean has stolen his identity and absconded. At first irate, then intrigued, John decides to lean into the switch and ‘play spies’ as he moves into Jean’s family estate. As he navigates mysterious backstories, complicated familial relationships and financial obligations he edges closer and closer to that ever desired insider status. But, at whose cost?

This jumps into the crux of the matter straightaway and contains a slow building dread and expertly crafted atmosphere.15 The chapters end with little electric jolts of information and the characters are supremely bizarre, keeping you guessing and intrigued even if you don’t especially like any of them. John’s lonely university professor/francophile character is a sharp contrast to the layabout, crass egoist Jean and it was fascinating to witness the mental gymnastics and motivations John creates for his actions. He realizes that a ‘freak of nature’ has allowed him a chance to escape himself and his depression to ‘become’ a Frenchman and constantly wrestles with what that entails. How he aligns (and does not align) with Jean and what this could mean existentially as well as practically provide interesting psychological pools that du Maurier plumbs in depth. As John plays the game he discovers that it may no longer be the farce is once was and he is forced to confront his deepest self along with his double’s. Will he conquer his double or will his double conquer him?16

How easy it was, after all, to be a cad

Jean has a few people living at his estate and his connections with each of them are initially unclear and require John to do some play acting which was stressful in a fun way. There were a few encounters that were so amusingly awkward that I had to laugh out loud. There’s a blend of the morbid and the freaky here with one of the character’s obsession with Christian martyrs and another’s extreme personality shifts which always kept me on my toes, never knowing where it was all headed. As it is a du Maurier novel, the setting and atmosphere are consistently described in gorgeous detail, creating a specific mood, ambiance, energy and tone and it ended up being more spiritual and philosophical than I had anticipated with such a pulpy premise. This is rich, poignant and bittersweet and while there are dark secrets, towered bedrooms and a murder mystery, I wouldn’t classify it as a Gothic. Its ending is suspenseful, surprising and strangely lovely though a bit tamer than I would have liked. Perhaps that says something about me… I also appreciated the inclusion of how the shadow of the Occupation continues to loom over people and place as this is set just over decade after World War 2.

He had given me what I asked, the chance to be accepted. He had lent me his name, his possessions, his identity. I had told him my own life was empty: he had given me his. I had complained of failure: he had lifted the burden of failure when he took my clothes and my car and drove away as myself. Whatever I had to carry now, in his stead, could not matter to me because it was no longer mine. Just as an actor paints old lines upon a young face, or hides behind the part he must create, so the old anxious self that I knew too well could be submerged and forgotten, and the new set would be someone without a care, without responsibility, calling himself Jean de Gué; for whatever this false Jean de Gué did, whatever folly he committed, it could not hurt me, the living John.