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Elyse Schein has dark hair, almost black. She wears a purple tunic with a grey turtleneck underneath. She has a cackling laugh, and a sarcastic sense of humour. She is fluent in French and Czech, and has lived in Paris and Prague. She is single. Over a lunchtime interview, she chooses a Diet Pepsi and a vegetable sandwich. She doesn't like meat.

Paula Bernstein has auburn hair. She wears a yellow sweater over a wool skirt. She doesn't laugh very much, and is more inclined to give a calm, considered explanation of what happened. Raised in the New York suburbs, she is married with two young children, and lives in Brooklyn. She chooses a Coke and a meat sandwich.

The two women are identical twins, but they didn't know the other existed until they were 35.

That was five years and a book ago. Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited is their dual account of the shocking news that has redefined their identity.

"We're a natural laboratory for nature versus nurture," offers Ms. Bernstein. "We raise questions of what does it mean to be who you are and how do you become who you are."

That sober assessment of their connection belies the joy and pain that their reunion caused.

In 2002, Ms. Schein was living in Paris, making ends meet by taking odd jobs as a tutor and receptionist while she worked on film projects. Growing up in New York, she had always known she was adopted, but had never bothered to search for her birth parents.

Fiercely independent in her bohemian life, Ms. Schein "wanted to go far away, to become someone else," she writes of her decision to live in Europe.

But at 33, the same age at which her adoptive mother had died - a birthday that caused intense introspection - she decided to contact the New York State Adoption Information Registry.

What unfolded would change her life and that of Ms. Bernstein, who was settled in her life as wife, mother and freelance writer. Ms. Schein's investigation with the adoption registry led her to discover she had a twin - and led to a reunion.

Ms. Bernstein, too, had never felt the need to discover her biological roots. In fact, in 2000, she had written a personal essay for Redbook magazine about how her birth parents played no part in her sense of identity.

But the discovery that they were identical twins set them off on a quest to uncover the circumstances of their birth and adoption. Their sleuthing caused Ms. Schein to return to New York.

As newborns, they had been placed with an adoption agency called Louise Wise Services. Their mother was 28 at the time of their birth and suffered from bipolar disorder, then diagnosed as schizophrenia, a fact neither knew but which shed light on their own struggles with depression. She died in 1978, when the girls were 9. The most shocking revelation, however, was that the twin infants had been separated - now an illegal practice in New York State - as part of a controversial child study.

The twins learned that Peter Neubauer, a prominent psychiatrist in New York, had worked in collaboration with the adoption agency to study the development of five sets of identical twins - and one set of triplets - as they were raised in different households in the 1950s.

It is the only nature-versus-nurture study of its kind in history. The adoptive parents were told that the child they took in was part of a development study, but not that he or she was a twin.

"Our adoptive parents were angry that they weren't given the chance to adopt us both," Ms. Bernstein says.

They must be intrigued, too.

"Of course," Ms. Schein offers. "But they don't talk to us about it. Maybe they don't want to give us a complex about it." She gestures to her twin across the table. "Her mother said to me recently that she was worried I would take Paula's identity."

"She did?" Ms. Bernstein responds. "She didn't tell me that. I wonder what she meant by that."

"I don't know," Ms. Schein shrugs.

The complexity of their relationship is evident still in the careful way the two women interact with one another. They profusely apologize when one cuts the other off inadvertently, and they have a tendency to over-explain themselves, mindful not to be speaking for the other.

Their book is a brutally honest description of feelings they admit were hard to say directly to one another. "I guess this isn't the time to confess that the idea of vanishing from Elyse's life has crossed my mind," Ms. Bernstein wrote about a visit with Ms. Schein in Paris. "During our marathon first date at Café Mogador only four months ago, it was love at first sight. Now I feel as if I've committed myself to a long-term relationship with someone I don't even know."

The women started off eagerly comparing notes. There were uncanny similarities. As children, they sucked the same pointer and middle fingers. They both got their menstrual period before they turned 13.

But soon, they became judgmental of one another. "A lot of the differences would not have been so arduous if we had just been sisters," says Ms. Schein.

"It's threatening, this alternate version of yourself," Ms. Bernstein notes, casting a wry glance at her sister.

They could joke about some of the differences. Ms. Schein had had liposuction on her thighs. "I could see my old butt on Paula," she says, laughing.

But the differences in their lifestyle proved problematic. Ms. Bernstein thought that her sister might consider her married life too bourgeois. And she found herself feeling highly critical of Ms. Schein's lifestyle. "She claims she is living the starving artist's life. But where is her art?" Ms. Bernstein wrote.

It turned out that Ms. Schein and Ms. Bernstein had been dropped from the study as infants, apparently because they were developing at different rates. The research on the other subjects, some of whom have since reunited, continued into adolescence, but was later abandoned over fear of the outcry its publication would produce, Ms. Bernstein explains.

The archives of the study, which ran from 1953 until 1997, were donated to Yale University. They have been sealed until 2066. Several times, the sisters tried to gain access to the notes, but were turned down.

"We felt that out lives were orchestrated by these puppet masters who put their own psychiatric research before the needs of us and these twins and triplets, and we were furious about that," says Ms. Schein.

They sought out Dr. Neubauer on the trail of their shared history. "He still expresses no remorse," Ms. Schein says. The sisters even suspect he was interested in continuing to study them. "At least, we got that feeling," Ms. Bernstein says. "He had a clinical interest in us. But we didn't want to give him the satisfaction of studying us. We stonewalled him."

The women briefly considered legal action, but they didn't pursue it because they do not consider themselves victims. "We are content with our lives we have led," says Ms. Schein. "We are both positive people. And writing the book was cathartic. We worked through a lot."

Ms. Schein now lives about 20 minutes away from Ms. Bernstein in Brooklyn. She often babysits her sister's children. "I didn't want to intrude upon her life. We give each other space but we do enjoy living close by," she says.

"You can't catch up on 35 years."

shampson@globeandmail.com