She overshadows Carolyn throughout their youth, and both of them know and feel this. Pamela Spiro Wagner, the dominant twin, is the first-born high-achiever, gifted at everything. At times heart-wrenching, this unique book is an honest portrayal of their battles, with each other and with the illness that has affected their lives and the lives of so many people around them. Pamela has first-hand experience from early in life, while Carolyn, as a loved one and eventually a mental health professional, is a witness to such severe mental illness. Their obvious difference is psychiatric: Pamela is given a diagnoses of schizophrenia, and Carolyn becomes a psychiatrist. The two struggle throughout life to form unique and distinct identities, both with and without the other. Beneath jealousy, pleas for attention, resentment, and competition lies a loving story of sisterly connection only twins could truly understand and experience. Their chapters are eloquently written, with each twin narrating her experience through significant life events, some parallel and others strikingly disparate. Spiro, M.D., is an autobiographical account of these twins: they are identical twins but clearly different from birth.
It is one of the most compelling histories of two such siblings in the canon of writing on mental illness.The book Divided Minds, by Pamela Spiro Wagner and Carolyn S. It is a true and unusually frank story of identical twins with very different identities and wildly different experiences of the world around them. Told in the alternating voices of the sisters, Divided Minds is a heartbreaking account of the far reaches of madness as well as the depths of ambivalence and love between twins. Carolyn continued to believe in the humanity of her sister, not merely in her illness, and Pamela responded. Exceeding everyone’s expectations, Carolyn graduated from Harvard Medical School and forged a successful career in psychiatry.ĭespite Pamela’s estrangement from the rest of her family, the sisters remained very close, “bonded with the twin glue,” calling each other several times a week and visiting as frequently as possible. Pamela’s illness allowed Carolyn to enter the spotlight that had for so long been focused on her sister.
But as the twins approached adolescence, Pamela began to suffer the initial symptoms of schizophrenia, hearing disembodied voices that haunted her for years and culminated during her freshman year of college at Brown University where she had her first major breakdown and hospitalization. Growing up in the fifties, Carolyn Spiro was always in the shadow of her more intellectually dominant and socially outgoing twin, Pamela. A riveting true story of sisters who were identical, until the voices began
0 kommentar(er)
