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. 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. By early adolescence she becomes withdrawn, and by the time she is a freshman at Brown she is tortured by chaotic thoughts, is hearing voices and fears that people are planning to harm her. 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. 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.
Her third book of poetry and art, LEARNING TO SEE IN THREE DIMENSIONS was published by Green Writers press and Sundog Poetry Center in June 2017.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. Her writing has appeared in the The New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Hartford Courant, and Tikkun among other places. Recently several poems won have honorable mentions at New Millennium Writings and two have also been short-listed for the Bridport Prize in the UK. Four years later, Ms Wagner’s book of poems, WE MAD CLIMB SHAKY LADDERS was published by CavanKerry Press (2009) and was a finalist for Foreward Review’s Poetry Book of the Year. Wagner won First Place in the 2001/2 international BBC World Service Radio Poetry Competition, judged by Nobelist Wole Soyinke for her poem “The Prayers of the Mathematician.” In 2005, she co-authored, with her twin sister, a psychiatrist, DIVIDED MINDS: Twin Sisters and their Journey through Schizophrenia (St Martin’s Press), which won the national NAMI Outstanding Literature Award and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. She currently resides in Brattleboro, Vermont, with her cat, Beanie Baby, where she disavows all labels, including those of any mental illness.
The passion to do poetry and art were just two of these. While Wagner has experienced much adversity in her life including the decades-long diagnosis of schizophrenia, she was also lucky enough to have been given four life-changing miracles. She later went to medical school for one and a half years, before being hospitalized for psychiatric care.
Pamela Spiro Wagner attended Brown University from 1970-1975.
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