Novelist Percival Everett, author of 2024 bestseller “James,” is quoted in a published interview on Creating Characters (1), but was contradicted by a study (2)

Q: “Your writing seems to speak to basic human yearnings and the search for the self. Do the individual voices you create try to respond to these yearnings?

PE: “The only reason I’m ever interested in characters in fiction is because they’re searching for something, and in some way anything we’re searching for has to do with self. We’re always trying to find out who we are and what we’re doing.

Q: How do you go about creating each individual voice?

PE: Writers have to be the best actors and become the people we’re writing about…You just have to take the time to become those people…

Q: Some writers say their characters do not surprise them…Do your characters ever inspire or shock you?

PE: Surprise me?…I really don’t believe in this thing that characters take on this life and do what they want to do…I am God. They do what I want, and it’s my world…” (1, pp. 51-52).

Comment: What does he mean by “become those people”? Switching to an alternate, character personality? Furthermore, a study of fifty novelists (2) had found that 90% experienced their characters as having independent agency: minds of their own (like alternate personalities).

1. Forrest Anderson. “Teaching Voice and Creating Meaning: An Interview with Percival Everett." In Conversations with Percival Everett, Edited by Joe Weixlmann, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

2. Marjorie Taylor, Sara D. Hodges, Adèle Kohányi. “The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?” Imagination, Cognition and Personality, Vol. 22(4) 361-380, 2002-2003. https://pages.uoregon.edu/hodgeslab/files/Download/Taylor%20Hodges%20Kohanyi_2003.pdf

Interesting Past Post

Novelists Zadie Smith (2) and George Saunders (3) Say Writers and Readers have Multiplicities 

George Saunders: I was thinking about something I heard you [Zadie Smith] say recently, about multiplicity. That meant a lot to me. When I think about what fiction does morally, I’m happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities—sort of fragmented. Maybe you could even think 100,000 people are inside each human being. And you drop a novel on that person, and a certain number of those sub-people come alive or get reenergized for some finite time. It’s maybe for just a few days even, depending on the book. Although there are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven’t died yet.

Zadie Smith: I think we understand this experience more from being readers than writers.

George Saunders: Yes, that’s right. I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That’s the highest aspiration. So A Christmas Carol  [which they had mentioned because it has ghosts like Saunders’ 2017 award-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo] would enliven a certain subset of those 100,000 internal people” (1, p. 175). “Like you [Zadie Smith], I have multiplicities” (1, p. 181).

Comment: Their opinions are apparently based on their own subjective experience. They suggest that readers of novels, like writers of novels, are more likely to have multiple personality trait than the average person.

1. Michael O’Connell (Editor). Conversations with George Saunders. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2022

2. Wikipedia. “Zadie Smith.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadie_Smith

3. Wikipedia. “George Saunders.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Saunders 

“Sociopath” (post 4) by Patric Gagne, PhD: Sociopathy and/or Multiple Personality?

Near the beginning of her memoir, Patric Gagne reports hearing a voice in her head (see post 2). Do sociopaths hear voices? And why doesn’t she ever mention it again?

Near the end of her memoir, she says: “I’m one person with David. A different person with you. And invisible to just about everyone else. That has to stop. I need to accept who I am all the time. I need to be who I am all the time. That’s the only way I’ll ever be able to stabilize my life” (1, p. 315).

Does she have sociopathy, dissociative identity (multiple personality) or both? A person who calls herself a liar warrants verification, especially since lying may occur in both sociopathy and multiple personality (search “lying” in this blog).

1. Patric Gagne, PhD. Sociopath (a memoir). New York, Simon & Schuster, 2024

“Sociopath” (post 3) by Patric Gagne, PhD: Interviewing Voices

In this memoir (1), Patric is occasionally seen by her psychotherapist, who—in my reading, so far—has not made any reference to the fact that Patric hears a voice (see post 2). Has her therapist ever asked Patric if she hears voices? Therapists have to ask, because patients may not volunteer such information, especially if it is nothing new.

A competent therapist will not only ask the patient if she hears a rational voice, but will try to interview the voice, which is often possible, once the voice does not fear that the therapist will try to kill off the voice.

“The patient may hear the alternate personality speak as an inner voice within, often as one of the ‘voices’ that the patient has been hearing for years. The patient can then relay these internal responses to the therapist” (2, p. 94).

1. Patric Gagne, PhD. Sociopath (a memoir). New York, Simon & Schuster, 2024.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. 

“Sociopath” (post 2) by Patric Gagne, PhD: Author says her “dark side” is merely a part of herself, and so is not really an “alternate personality”

“I felt the sensation of pressure as it began its familiar rise. You can do anything you want, said the voice in my head.

“It was true. In the dark with everyone sleeping, I was completely at liberty. I could get Grace’s bike from the garage and take a midnight cruise around the community. I could spy on the neighbors. Without any adults to deal with or my sister to guard, there was nothing to stop me from doing something outrageous. Only I don’t want to do something outrageous, I thought angrily…

“You love it, said the voice in my head.”

“It was true. I did love it. The voice in my head was not coming from some alternate personality. It was my voice—my dark side” (1, p. 41).

Comment: In the obsolete view of multiple personality as “possession,” an alternate personality was thought of as a spirit or demon; i.e., some sort of invasive outsider. But in the modern, psychological view, an alternate personality is merely a psychological component of the person, often referred to by persons with undiagnosed multiple personality as an opinionated or pushy ‘part,’ sometimes heard as a voice in their head.

1. Patric Gagne, PhD. Sociopath (a memoir). New York, Simon & Schuster, 2024. 

Added same day: Coincidentally, both psychopathy and multiple personality were brought to the public’s attention by the same American psychiatrist, Hervey M. Cleckley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hervey_M._Cleckley

“Sociopath” (post 1) by Patric Gagne, PhD: Mirror Experience Similar to Symptom of Dissociative Identity (Multiple Personality)

“Baby [your beloved pet] died.”

“I was in the living room watching television when Mom told me…and my little sister [Harlowe] was [upstairs] crying her eyes out.

“Patric, did you hear me? Mom asked, aggravated.

“I had [heard her], only I wasn’t sure what to do about it. The news of Baby’s death…was just rattling around in my head. I blinked a few times, then nodded to my mother and continued watching television.

“After a heavy sigh to convey that my non-reaction was unacceptable, she headed upstairs to comfort Harlowe. And for the first time I could recall, I was jealous. I wanted to be upstairs crying, too…I knew I was ‘supposed’ to be at least as visibly devastated as my sister. So why wasn’t I?

“I looked at my reflection…I closed my eyes and concentrated until I could feel tears welling up behind my lids. Then I looked again. That’s more like it, I thought.

“The girl behind the glass with tears streaming down her face looked like someone who had just lost a pet. She looked like someone who needed consoling. But I knew the girl on my side of the glass could not look that way, at least not without making a conscious effort. I blinked, and my concentration broke. The tears disappeared. I returned my attention to the television.

“To say I felt nothing isn’t true. I loved Baby more than almost anything in the world…And yet here we were, and here she wasn’t…I get it. I’m just not experiencing it for myself.

“ I could tell that my mother didn’t know what to do with a kid like me…

"It wasn’t so much that I was lacking the feeling as it was that I was separated from it, like my reflection…I could see my emotions, but wasn’t connected to them…” (1, pp. 38-39).

Comment: Search “mirror” or “mirrors” in this blog for past posts on this symptom of multiple personality disorder.

I’m reading this memoir of a sociopath, because I’m not an expert on sociopathy, and I wondered if there were any similarity to multiple personality. So the above passage, near the beginning of this memoir, caught my attention.

1. Patric Gagne, PhD. Sociopath (a memoir). New York, Simon & Schuster, 2024. 

“James” by Percival Everett: Protagonist’s two distinct ways of speaking suggest Double Consciousness, a culturally-induced version of Multiple Personality, for which the protagonist’s apparent memory gaps may be a cardinal symptom.

James (1), by the eminent novelist Percival Everett (2), is a reimagined version of Mark Twain, as discussed in the New York Times review (3).

Comment: Everett’s protagonist is fluent in both black-slave vernacular and white slave-owner vernacular, which he repeatedly demonstrates, which looks like he is easily switching back and forth between two personalities.

This illustrates “Double Consciousness” (4), which many think of as a purely social phenomenon, but may be a culturally-induced, mild form of multiple personality, since multiple personality is multiple consciousness.

In addition, there is a hint of memory gaps, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality: "Hours went by. I may have slept, though when I was awake I was convinced I hadn’t” (1, p. 241). And “just what happened next is blurry in my memory…” (1, p. 273). A novel’s gratuitous suggestions of multiple personality may reflect an author’s multiple personality trait.

Please Search “double consciousness” in this blog for relevant past discussions of other literary examples.

1. Percival Everett. James. New York, Doubleday, 2024.

2. Wikipedia. “Percival Everett. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_Everett

3. Dwight Garner. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/books/review/percival-everett-james.html

4. Wikipedia. “Double Consciousness.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_consciousness 

“Listen for the Lie” (post 2) by Amy Tintera: Protagonist has both Dissociative (Psychogenic) Amnesia and Dissociative Identity (Multiple Personality)

Lucy has had dissociative (psychogenic) amnesia for the circumstances of her best friend’s death. Memory gaps are a major symptom of multiple personality. The protagonist also has a voice in her head that has a mind of its own, which is the essence of alternate personalities.

And the fact that Amy Tintera made Lucy a published author (1, p. 247) suggests that she identified with her protagonist, and, thus, may have the higher-functioning version of multiple personality, multiple personality trait, a creative asset.

1. Amy Tintera. Listen for the Lie. New York, Celadon, 2024. 

“Listen for the Lie” (post 1) by Amy Tintera: People think Lucy killed her best friend, but Lucy can’t remember that night, and can’t believe she did it

“A soft voice, a voice I [Lucy] always try to ignore, whispers in my ear, Let’s kill—” (1, p. 15).

Comment: I’m curious to see how the author explains it.

1. Amy Tintera. Listen for the Lie. New York, Celadon, 2024.

“Throne of Glass” by Sarah J. Maas: Italicized, third-person voice of alternate personality in character’s head

        “Yes, she would go—to Rifthold, to anywhere, even through the Gates of the Wyrd and into Hell itself, if it meant freedom.

  “After all, you aren’t Adarlan’s Assassin for nothing” (1, p.19).

Comment: Since the italicized sentence addresses the character in the third person, it is probably not the character’s own thought, but the voice in her head of an alternate personality. Search “italics,” “italicized,” and “italicized voices” in this blog for examples in other novels. 

In a novel, this may reflect an author’s creative, multiple personality trait, the main subject of this blog.

1. Sarah J. Maas. Throne of Glass. New York, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012/2023.

2. Wikipedia. “Sarah J. Maas.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_J._Maas

Two Introductions to Novelist Stephen King: 

1. Links to Current New York Times Book Review

2. Search “Stephen King” in This Blog for past posts

1. Current New York Times Book Review

https://www.nytimes.com/article/stephen-king-books.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/books/review/stephen-king-carrie-50-anniversary.html

2. Search “Stephen King” and/or specific titles of his books, in this blog.

“Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert” by Brian Herbert, his eldest son, who does not say the author of Dune had multiple personality

Comment: This 576-page biography (1) includes an index, which does not reference “split personality,” “multiple personality,” or “dissociative identity “disorder,” either for Frank Herbert, Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune, or even Frank Herbert’s earlier novel, The White Plague, in which the protagonist has explicit multiple personality disorder (see recent posts).

Of course, if an author did have “multiple personality trait,” my term for a nonclinical, creative version of the disorder, the author would neither be nor look mentally ill, and would not exhibit behavior that the average person would recognize as a split personality; except, possibly, in an emotional crisis, or in response to questions about memory gaps, pseudonyms, or episodes of behavior that were atypical for that person.

1. Brian Herbert. Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert. New York, Tor, 2003.

“The White Plague” (post 3) by Frank Herbert: Gratuitous Multiple Personality by the Author of “Dune”

“The transition had gone much more simply than he had anticipated. There remained one more essential detail to complete it. Over the next three days, he removed the hair from his head. There had been a choice—shave or do something more permanent. He chose the latter course, not an insurmountable task for a biochemist, although it proved painful and left a fine network of pink scars…The mole on his left cheek vanished under an application of liquid nitrogen…The change fascinated him…He smiled. John Roe O’Neill, rather plump and with a rich matt of brown hair, a distinctive mole on his cheek, had become this bald, slender man with eyes of burning intensity.

“Hello, John Leo Patrick McCarthy, he whispered.

“None of his old mildness had survived. This Other was driven from within" (1, pp. 38-39).

Comment: The protagonist’s old and new personalities now differ in their names, memories, attitudes, and preferred appearance, making it explicitly clear that he has a split personality (a.k.a. multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder). Of course, it’s presence in this novel is gratuitous, since revenge plots, per se, do not require it.

When recently thinking of reading Frank Herbert’s blockbuster “Dune” novels, I discovered that he’d previously written this explicitly multiple personality novel. So, I thought, for the purpose of this blog, it would waste my time to look for gratuitous symptoms of multiple personality in the “Dune” epic if the author had already shown his affinity for multiple personality in The White Plague, which I’ve now confirmed.

Meanwhile, I’ve ordered a biography of Frank Herbert to see if anything else connects him to the multiple personality trait I’ve previously detected in many other great novelists, which is the subject of this blog.

1. Frank Herbert. The White Plague. New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982.

“The White Plague” (post 2) by Frank Herbert: A New Personality

“The pattern of change built itself slowly in John Roe O’Neill…At such times, he thought of the old beliefs in possession. It was like that—another personality taking over his flesh and nerves.

Much later, he came to a personal accommodation with this Other, even a sense of familiarity and identity. He thought of it then as partly his own making, partly a thing rising out of primal darkness, a deliberate creation for the task of revenge. Certainly, his Old Self had not been up to such a deed. The kindly teacher-of-the-young could not have contemplated such a plan for an instant. The Other had to come into being first.

As this change became fixed in its purpose, John saw an astonishing alteration in his appearance. The old almost plump self went stringing down to a slender, nervous man…The change within him had become an obsession. Then he looked at himself in the bedroom mirror one Saturday morning and knew he would have to take action. Mary and the twins had been dead and buried four months. The Other was strong in him now; a new face, a new personality” (1, pp. 28-29).

1. Frank Herbert. The White Plague. New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982.

2. Wikipedia. “The White Plague.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague.

“The White Plague” (post 1) by Frank Herbert (author of “Dune”): Memory Gap for Terrorist Car-Bombing in Ireland

His wife had been decapitated and the twins killed. “Somewhere within him there existed an understanding of that scene…He knew he had seen what he had seen: the explosion, the death. Intellectual awareness argued the facts. I was standing at that window, I must have seen the blast. But the particulars lay behind a screen he could not penetrate. It lay frozen within him, demanding action lest the frozen thing thaw and obliterate him” (1, pp. 15-16).

Comment: Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of dissociative identity disorder (a.k.a. multiple personality disorder). It happens when the regular or “host” personality is not co-conscious with the alternate personality who has a particular memory. In the above, “Intellectual awareness” may be a logical alternate personality who tells the host personality what must have happened. Another alternate personality may be demanding action.

I don’t know whether the author will label this as an intentional case of multiple personality, or it is merely a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait.

Added same day: A person with more than one personality can both know and not know something or both remember and not remember something.

1. Frank Herbert. The White Plague. New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982.

2. Wikipedia. “Frank Herbert.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert 

“What Happened To The Bennetts” by Lisa Scottoline: Hearing Voices Help Father and Young Son Cope with Murder of Sister

“Do you think she’s a ghost [asks young son]? 

“Well, I [Father] believe she’s always with us. Her soul is with us.

“I believe that, too. I talk to her, Dad. Is that weird?

“No, not at all. I talk to her, too, and I hear her voice…(1, p. 125).

“I [Father] sat at the laptop in the kitchen, on autopilot…I had been online for hours, scrolling mindlessly. The house was quiet. I felt raw, exhausted, and broken, alone with my thoughts.

“What can you do about it?” (1, p. 169).

Comment: Since ordinary thoughts do not hold conversations with the regular self or address the regular self in the third person—but alternate personalities may do so—the above suggests that a mild form of multiple personality is helping this father and son cope with a death in the family.

But since no character has been labeled as having multiple personality, the above may reflect the author’s multiple personality trait.

1. Lisa Scottoline. What Happened To The Bennetts. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2022. 

“Louder Than Hunger” by John Schu: “In achingly honest free verse, the author takes readers inside the life of a boy with an eating disorder and a loud voice in his head” (front flap)

—Who is this narrator?

“I’m hoping by writing my name (Jake) over and over, I’ll figure out who I am” (1, pp. 5-6).

Comment: How could he know everyone calls him “Jake,” but not be sure who he is? Perhaps the narrator is really a nameless alternate personality.

He says, “I look at a photo of Emily Dickinson taped to my desk. I know her poem by heart. “I’m nobody! Who are you…Are you—Nobody—too? (1, p. 8).

—Mirror 

“In the mirror is an ugly, grotesque blob staring back at me, telling me I’m a waste of space, pathetic, worthless. Is that really me? I usually avoid mirrors” (1, p. 50).

Comment:“MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror…In some instances, these alterations of perception of self are so disturbing that the individuals may phobically avoid mirrors (2, p. 62).

—Title, Louder Than Hunger

Comment: The title of this book refers to the loud, coherent voice that the protagonist hears in his head. This title, in and of itself, suggests that this is a multiple personality story: “Almost always, the voices (in MPD) are described as being “heard” within the patient’s head or experienced as ‘loud thoughts.’ They are usually heard clearly and distinctly. These features can help to distinguish them from the auditory hallucinations found in schizophrenic patients, which are more often (but certainly not always) experienced as emanating from outside the person and are often heard indistinctly. The hallucinatory voices of MPD patients often carry on lengthy discussions that seem coherent and logical to the patient” (2, p. 62).

Like novelists conversing with their characters.

1. John Schu. Louder Than Hunger. Somerville Massachusetts, Candlewick Press, 2024.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.