[2] This proved to be traumatic for the twins, eventually causing their school administrators to dismiss them early each day so that they might avoid bullying.
The girls' idioglossia has frequently been characterised as an example of cryptophasia, or a language devised and shared only by a set of twins, but June Gibbons has disputed this, stating that this was simply the effect of their speech impediment.
According to June, the twins had in fact been speaking English, which others had mistaken for an invented language due to the severity of their speech difficulties.
[11][page needed] When they were reunited, the two spent several years isolating themselves in their bedroom, engaging in elaborate plays with dolls.
They created many plays and stories in a sort of soap opera style, reading some of them aloud on tape as gifts for their sister Rose.
[5] Set primarily in the United States, and particularly in Malibu, California, the stories involve young men and women who exhibit strange and often criminal behaviour.
[11][page needed] June wrote a novel titled The Pepsi-Cola Addict, in which the high-school hero is seduced by a teacher, then sent away to a reformatory where a homosexual guard makes a play for him.
[13] This was the only accessible work by either of the Gibbons sisters, which remained unavailable for purchase and held in only 89 libraries in the world[14] until October 2022, when it was republished as a limited edition print by Cashen's Gap.
[16][17] Their other attempts to publish novels and stories were generally unsuccessful, although Cashen's Gap is planning future releases by June and Jennifer Gibbons.
[15] In Jennifer's The Pugilist, a physician is so eager to save his child's life that he kills the family dog to obtain its heart for a transplant.
Jennifer also wrote Discomania, the story of a young woman who discovers that the atmosphere of a local disco incites patrons to insane violence.
[5] Jennifer's Discomania is planned to be published posthumously in 2025[18] through Strange Attractor Press with a foreword by David Tibet of Current 93.
"[5] Placed on high doses of antipsychotic medications, they found themselves unable to concentrate; Jennifer apparently developed tardive dyskinesia (a neurological disorder resulting in involuntary, repetitive movements).
Their medications were apparently adjusted sufficiently to allow them to continue the copious diaries they had begun in 1980, and they were able to join the hospital choir, but they lost most of their interest in creative writing.
[11][page needed] The case achieved notoriety due to newspaper coverage by journalist Marjorie Wallace of The Sunday Times.
[25] At the inquest, June revealed that Jennifer had been acting strangely for about a day before their release; her speech had been slurring, and she had said that she was dying.
[20] The American poet Lucie Brock-Broido wrote a poem, "Elective Mutes", about the twins in her first book The Hunger, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1988.