Phoebe Buffay's Friends Timeline Explained

From the very start, Phoebe's life was unconventional. She was born to (and named after) Phoebe Abbott (Terri Garr), who was in a sexual relationship with two other people, Frank Buffay Sr. (Bob Balaban) and Lily Buffay, a drug dealer. Her natural mother actually gave birth to both Phoebe and her twin sister Ursula, but when Phoebe Abbott decided she didn't want to be a mother, she left Frank and Lily to raise the girls on their own.

Sadly, Frank soon abandoned Lily, who was ill-suited to give Phoebe and Ursula anything resembling a normal childhood. In the Season 2 episode "The One Where Old Yeller Dies," Phoebe admitted her step-mother never let her see the end of sad movies like "Old Yeller" in order to shield her from pain. Oddly enough, this didn't seem to extend to her actual life, since Lily married a man who went to prison and later killed herself by sticking her head in an oven and getting carbon monoxide poisoning.

As if this wasn't bad enough, while Ursula was sent into foster care, Phoebe wound up living on the streets at the tender age of fourteen. With the twins on such divergent life paths, it's no wonder that they ended up becoming two very different people.