Growing up in the fifties, Carolyn Spiro was always in the shadow of her more intellectually dominant and social outgoing twin, Pamela. But as the twins approached adolescence, Pamela began to succumb to schizophrenia, hearing disembodied voices and eventually suffering many breakdowns and hospitalizations.
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. 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. It is a true and unusually frank story of identical twins with very different identities and wildly different experiences of the world around them. Pamela Spiro Wagner is a writer and poet living in Wethersfield, Connecticut. She is the winner of the 1993 Connecticut Mental Health Media Award, a two-time first-prize winner of the Tunxis Poetry Review, and the winner of the 2002 BBC International Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, Tikkun, Trinity Review, Midwest Poetry Review, and LA Weekly.


Carolyn S. Spiro, M.D., is a private-practice psychiatrist and writer living in Wilton, Connecticut. Growing up in the fifties, Carolyn Spiro was always in the shadow of her more intellectually dominant and socially outgoing twin, Pamela. But as the twins approached adolescence, Pamela began to suffer the initial symptoms of schizophrenia, hearing disembodied voices that haunted her for years, the symptoms culminating during her freshman year of college at Brown University, where she had her first major breakdown and hospitalization. Pamela's illness allowed Carolyn to enter the spotlight that had for so long been focused on her sister. Exceeding everyone's expectations, Carolyn graduated from Harvard Medical School and forged a successful career in psychiatry.


Despite 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. Carolyn continued to believe in the humanity of her sister, not merely in her illness, and Pamela responded.


Told in the alternating voices of the sisters, Divided Minds is an account of the far reaches of madness as well as the depths of ambivalence and love between twins. It is a true and unusually frank story of identical twins with very different identities and wildly different experiences of the world around them. It is one of the most compelling histories of two such siblings in the canon of writing on mental illness. "[Divided Minds is] the product of months of painstakingly peeling back layers to write honestly about sisterhood, illness and love . . . The book provides detailed memories of the sisters, and it is fascinating to see how they both remember the same event . . . This is not meant to be a book about history, but a book of memory between sisters who cling to one another through the fog. Their sisterhood is especially obvious when the women try to explain themselves, in print, to one another. What sister hasn't wanted that chance?"—Susan Campbell, The Hartford Courant "[Divided Minds is] the product of months of painstakingly peeling back layers to write honestly about sisterhood, illness and love . . . The book provides detailed memories of the sisters, and it is fascinating to see how they both remember the same event . . . This is not meant to be a book about history, but a book of memory between sisters who cling to one another through the fog. Their sisterhood is especially obvious when the women try to explain themselves, in print, to one another. What sister hasn't wanted that chance?"—Susan Campbell, The Hartford Courant "[A] riveting memoir . . . Divided Minds does a remarkable job of interpreting [a] hellish realm."—People "A vividly honest account . . . While Pamela becomes mysteriously moody and depressed, Carolyn blossoms in school and as a dancer . . . The book has remarkable details of Pamela's life, from her bizarre delusions to the twin's dual attempts to stay extremely thin in high school."—Joy Victory, The Journal News "Joint memoir by a pair of identical twins, one a writer and award-winning poet with an incurable mental disease and the other a practicing psychiatrist. When the Spiro girls were young, Pamela was considered the more creative, brilliant one, but by 1963, when they were in sixth grade, the first inklings of her future disorder appeared: on hearing of President Kennedy's assassination, she believed that she was to blame. With gripping detail, she describes her descent into mental chaos, revealing the frightening nature of schizophrenia and her confusion and helplessness when under its spell. By early adolescence she becomes withdrawn, and by the time she is a freshman at Brown she is tortured by chaotic thoughts, is hearing voices and fears that people are planning to harm her. After overdosing on Sominex, she is taken by Carolyn to the college infirmary, the first of the countless stays in hospitals and sessions with psychiatrists that will mark the rest of her life. The sisters' relationship is an ambiguous one: after that first semester at Brown, they talk on the phone for hours every week, but they never go home to visit their parents at the same time. Pamela's illness permits Carolyn to shine but it does not end their sibling rivalry. Both enter medical school after college, but while Carolyn is studying at Harvard Medical School, Pam is at the University of Connecticut, the only school that would admit her. Within a year, she's back in a mental hospital, catatonic and hearing commanding voices. The sisters alternate in the telling, but this is clearly Pamela's book, for without her schizophrenia, there would be no story. It is she that is the powerful storyteller at its center, she that alters the Spiro family dynamic, she that suffers and makes demands, embarrasses and frustrates. With the rest of her family uncomfortable around Pamela, Carolyn struggles to be her sister, not her psychiatrist, yet being a psychiatrist makes all the difference in the caretaker relationship that develops over time. The combination of first-person narratives provides an unusually well-rounded portrait of schizophrenia."—Kirkus Reviews "For many, the idea of being one of identical twins—and possibly the possessor of telepathic communicative powers—sends chills up the spine. Add certifiable schizophrenia to the potent emotional state of identical twinship, and the potential for nightmare magnifies. In their disturbingly powerful memoir, however, the Spiro sisters reveal all this as the stuff of their everyday reality. Explosive encounters with one another, other family members, friends, and medical professionals are recounted with jarring straightforwardness. Alternating recollections about being half of a pair of youngsters growing up in the 1960s highlight the sisters' individual personalities while they relate sisterly connections, competitiveness, and co-option. When Pamela's illness emerged at the beginning of adolescence and subsequently spiraled out of her control, it became a virtual separate entity that t