Gina DeMillo Wagner on Family Disability in 'Forces of Nature'

Award-winning journalist and author, Gina DeMillo Wagner, visits Writer’s Voices to discuss her first book, a memoir titled Forces of Nature: A Memoir of Family, Loss, and Finding Home. The book tells of her journey as the sibling and caregiver of a disabled brother and how that experience shaped her as an adult. Wagner explained, “My older brother, Alan, had a rare genetic disability called Prader-Willi syndrome. There are a lot of things that are characteristic with Prader-Willi, but one of the big things is these violent mood swings. He could be extremely loving and gentle one minute, and then really terrifying the next.” Growing up, no one ever explained to Wagner that her brother had a disability. She only knew that she was very different than him because by a certain age, she had outpaced him developmentally. It wasn’t until she started school and spent time at a friend’s house that she noticed her home life was considerably different than theirs. Luckily for Wagner, what she lacked at home was made up for at school. She had many of her needs met by teachers, classmates, and friends there. “If I felt invisible at home, if I felt unseen at home, school was a place where I could be seen and recognized.”

At the age of 43, Alan died suddenly. Wagner reflected, “I was left with some questions. The biggest question was what happened… if you lose somebody really suddenly and unexpectedly you want to know what went wrong, but because of his intellectual disabilities, I also wondered things like, did he know that I loved him? Could he feel that love? Did he understand that people could fear him, but also love him at the same time? …and what I discovered is that the question of what happened to my brother is really a question of what happened to me and what happened to us growing up.”

For Wagner, going back to relive the past and revisiting painful memories was not as difficult as it once was. “I think for me, I had done so much healing work and processing off the page that by the time I sat down to write it wasn’t like I was re-opening old wounds, and I developed also some self-care around it, too, in terms of just blocking out my time as much as I could. I learned that if I wrote a scene that was really emotionally charged, I should do something immediately afterwards. I should go for a hike, I should go swim laps at the rec center. I needed to do something to move my body afterwards to clear my nervous system.”