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Divided Minds by Pamela Spiro Wagner: book review




Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and Their Journey through Schizophrenia (2006) is the true story of American identical twins Carolyn and Pamela Spiro growing up in the 1960s. It spans from 1958 to 2003. 

Author Pamela Wagner was always the quieter twin until adolescence. As she entered her teenage years her life became more prominent due to the onset of her ‘illness’ – chronic paranoid schizophrenia. 

 

Pamela begins the story of the twin’s lives in 1999, recalling the years when she is at university in the 1970s, has psychotic episodes, and is hospitalized in a psychiatric ward – ‘empty. Alone.’ Pamela is desperate to get to the telephone in the hospital so that she can call Carolyn (Lynnie). This is when their identical lives becomes divided lives. In trying to stay together with her twin, although they connect frequently, they do not have the same minds. One has a healthy, stable mind and the other does not. 

 

Pamela reflects on her childhood with her sister in 1958. And 1963-1969. Carolyn also writes sections on her perspective of the same events, as Pamela develops voices in her mind. In their writing, they try to pinpoint the events leading to Pamela’s brain shift.

 

With Pamela hospitalized, their parents expect Carolyn’s mind to snap too. But Carolyn shines academically, graduating from Harvard Medical School in psychiatry. The sisters’ bond remains as tight as glue.

 

Pamela is released from the state hospital in the mid-1980s, not knowing what she is going to do. The voices in her head continue. Her flat-mate Mariah introduces Pamela to poetry: ‘it is as if a long-barred door has swung open and I am given a vision of an unimaginably lovely landscape: poetry, poetry!Like the deep crimsons and gold-veined ochres of buttes rising above the tableland of the ordinary.’ Life does not miraculously get better, but now there is a purpose and an outlet for her feelings and thoughts.

 

This is an interesting, poignant account of schizophrenia from two perspectives that show that life is not identical, and neither is the reaction of identical twins to the same event that changed their lives. 

 

 

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

 

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