To me that's a one-and-done comment, especially since Pamela mentions it as a reason why she would quit the drug, but it appeared again and again in Carolyn's narrative. For example, I tired of hearing her describe her sister's weight gain on one of the anti-psychotics. But the pettiness in particular got to me. I think her plight would have provoked far more emotion in me if she had simply laid it out as it happened rather than reminding me, the reader, how burdened she was by her sister's illness, and then how ashamed she was for feeling that way. However, her tone was self-pitying, self-focused, and sometimes downright petty. For example, no doubt Carolyn has been through hell and back and experienced torment that few of us can even imagine. If I had been the editor, I would have suggested some judicious cuts. The coolness of her narration heightened the emotions-the sign, to me, anyway, of an expert writer.Ĭarolyn, on the other hand, while more successful professionally and clearly quite intelligent herself, grew more unlikable as a narrator the deeper I got into the book. How they can have the structure and the plausibility of something real. In fact, in her narration of her extreme schizophrenia, I felt able to see-to really feel, actually-how these delusions can feel very real. I was not surprised to learn she was a decorated poet.

Clearly, Pamela Wagner, the twin suffering from schizophrenia, is a substantial talent.

It's hard to give this book two stars because it's essentially a dual narrative, and I very much like one of those narratives. It is a true and unusually frank story of identical twins with very different identities and wildly different experiences of the world around them.I chose this book for research purposes (characters in my novel are twins-boy and girl-and one is schizophrenic) and had high hopes. 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. But as the twins approached adolescence, Pamela began to succumb to schizophrenia, hearing disembodied voices and eventually suffering many breakdowns and hospitalizations.ĭivided Minds is a dual memoir of identical twins, one of whom faces a life sentence of schizophrenia, and the other who becomes a psychiatrist, after entering the spotlight that had for so long been focused on her sister. Growing up in the fifties, Carolyn Spiro was always in the shadow of her more intellectually dominant and social outgoing twin, Pamela.

Divided Minds is a dual memoir of identical twins, one of whom faces a life sentence of schizophrenia, and the other who becomes a psychiatrist, after entering the spotlight that had for so long been focused on her sister.

Divided Minds by Pamela Spiro Wagner