Indie-folk duo Tegan and Sara Quin discussed their memoir, High School, on Seth Meyers’ late-night talk show Wednesday.
The 2019 book by the twin sisters, who perform under the name Tegan and Sara, is being adapted as a television series by Amazon Freevee; it’s scheduled to premiere on Oct. 14.
Meyers asked the Quins what it was like co-writing a memoir.
“The first part of the process was just terror,” Tegan Quin responded. “A couple months into it, one of our editors was like, ‘You need a timeline and some structure.’ And we just decided we would just tell our story in our own voices, and then just have the chapters alternate. And then there’s a lot of embellishment on both of our parts.”
“When you read each other’s chapters, were there times that you thought to yourself, ‘That didn’t happen’?” Meyers asked.
“I remember being in therapy and saying—” Sara Quin responded, to which her sister rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, God, here we go.”
“I’ve always known Tegan’s a liar,” Sara Quin continued, “but the part that shocked me was actually just how truly different her story was from what I thought it was going to be. We’re both gay, and we started to really understand that part of our identity in high school. And I was ready to talk about that, to really explore that suffering and that fear I had as an adolescent. And I read Tegan’s story, and she’s just not in touch with that part of herself.”
“Well, no, I just didn’t suffer,” Tegan Quin shot back.
Meyers asked whether the twins came out to each other; both Quins answered, “No.”
“I’m gay,” Sara Quin then said to her sister, who responded with, “I think we all know.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
