“The Vegetarian” by Han Kang, winner of both Booker and Nobel Prizes

Introduction: This very short novel didn’t hold my interest, so I’ll just highlight a few, possibly dissociative disorder-related, facts and symptoms. Her husband introduces the title character on the first page of text, thus:

“The passive personality of this woman in whom I could detect neither freshness nor charm, or anything especially refined, suited me down to the ground” (1, p.10)…“The paunch that started appearing in my mid-twenties, my skinny legs and forearms that steadfastly refused to bulk up in spite of my best efforts, the inferiority complex I used to have about the size of my penis—I could rest assured that I wouldn’t have to fret about such things on her account…And so it was only natural that I would marry the most run-of-the-mill woman in the world…(1, p. 10).

“She was a woman of few words. It was rare for her to demand anything of me…More than likely she would spend the time reading, which was practically her only hobby…reading books that looked so dull I couldn’t even bring myself to so much as look inside the covers…”

“Her face was turned away from me, and she was standing there so unnaturally still it was almost as if there was someone I couldn’t see—some kind of ghost standing near the fridge. What was going on? If she couldn’t hear me, then perhaps that meant she was sleepwalking. When I put my hand on her shoulder I was surprised by her complete lack of reaction…She’d simply ignored me. (1, p 13).

    “I had a dream.”

    Her voice was surprisingly clear.

   She kept putting parcels of meat into the rubbish bag, seemingly no more aware of my existence than she had been last night.

   “I had a dream.”

   Those words again.

“The very idea that there should be this side to her.

“So you’re saying that from now on, there’ll be no rest in the house?”

“Until when?”

“I suppose…forever.” (1, p. 19).

“When a person undergoes such a drastic transformation, there’s simply nothing anyone else can do but sit back and let them get on with it” (1, 21).

 “According to my wife, he (her Father-in-law) had whipped her over the calves until she was eighteen years old.” (1. p. 35).

“I become a different person, a different person rises up inside me, devours me, those hours…” (1, p.38).

Comment: Though I’ve noted some dissociative symptoms and a history of abuse at a younger age, I can’t be more definitive, because my attention was not even held to the end. Judging by the literary prizes, that is probably my fault.

1. Han Kang. The Vegetarian. Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith. New York, Hogarth, 2007/2015/2018., pp.185.

 

“The Forrest for the Trees: an Editor’s Advice to Writers” (1, 2) by Betsy Lerner

“Most writers appear neurotic; the truth is, we don’t know the half of it” (1, p. 98).

“Every editor becomes a de facto therapist, whether or not he engages in the therapeutic as well as the editorial process” (1, p. 108).

1. Betsy Lerner. The Forrest for the Trees (an Editor’s Advice to Writers). New York, Riverside, 2000/2010.

2. Publisher’s Weekly Review. 

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers

Betsy Lerner. Riverhead Books, (284pp) ISBN 978-1-57322-152-8

In a quirky, informal, engaging guide for aspiring writers, Lerner, a literary agent who was most recently executive editor at Doubleday, assumes the posture of the writer's sympathetic friend, coach and psychotherapist all rolled into one. She views writers as neurotic by definition--isolated, a breed apart, prone to phobias and ritualized behaviors, often seething with bottled-up envy, desire for vindication or revenge, obsessed with sex and money (""In other words, the stuff of great books,"" she quips). Instead of worrying about fame or rejection, or seeking vicarious parental approval through publication, blocked writers and those who can't figure out what they should be writing ought to pursue their obsessions, she urges, mindful that many of the best books are born of anger, pain or the struggle for self-definition. Lerner candidly draws on her experience working both sides of the fence, as poet and teacher of writing workshops as well as editor and agent. She offers hard-nosed advice on topics often overlooked, such as the dynamics of author/editor and author/agent relations; struggles against the temptations of alcohol and drugs; the testing of book titles for marketability; acrimony over jacket art. While a lot of her straight talk has a familiar ring, readers will glean practical nuggets. The book's real value, however, lies in compelling the ambivalent writer to confront his or her inner dreams, demons and strengths, and Lerner illuminates this task with a nonstop barrage of anecdotes and apt observations on writing drawn from Dickens, Orwell, Whitman, Updike, Nabokov, Vidal, Mailer, Grisham, Sontag, Philip Roth and many more. (Apr.)

“Fox” (post 1) a novel by Joyce Carol Oates: Engaging Vocabulary

Front Flap (1):

“beguiles”

“hypnotic”

“magnetically diabolical”

“multiple points of view”

Pages 8-12 (1)

“Yes yes I will do anything you ask.”

“Under the command of her human”

“she is obliged to obey”

“hypnotized”

“For this, I was born”

Comment: If the title character will be a hypnotic villain, the above may be seen as just setting the stage. But is it inadvertently, mildly, hypnotizing avid readers?  Having learned the basics of hypnosis from my past decades as a psychiatrist, I know that the above is probably sufficient to mildly hypnotize highly hypnotizable people, which may include avid readers in their avid reading frame-of-mind. Indeed, “multiple points of view” may be particularly engaging of readers with a mild degree of multiple personality, which is more common than most people think.

Of course, all successful novelists know ways to engage their readers. It’s their job.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. Fox. New York, Hogarth, 2025. 

“Manhattan Beach” by Jennifer Egan: Protagonist gets advice in the form of an italicized voice in her head

“Have you any brothers?” Tabatha asked.

“A sister,” Anna said.

“How pretty?”

“Extremely pretty,” Anna said gravely, then added, “She looks like our mother, who danced with the Follies.” The error of this boast accosted her a moment later. Never part with a fact unless you’ve no choice. Her father’s voice in her ears” (1, p. 6).

Comment: Why didn’t the text simply say that she remembered her father’s advice? Why did she remember his advice in the form of a voice? Because she had retained his advice in the form of an alternate personality who was made in his image and/or who recalled what he had said.

Persons with alternate personalities may hear their voices in their head (2, p. 94). Novelists often have a normal, creative version of multiple personality, as discussed in many past posts. Also search “italicized voices” in this blog.

1. Jennifer Egan. Manhattan Beach, New York, Scribner, 2017.

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

“The Seducer’s Diary” by Søren Kierkegaard: In the Foreword, Novelist John Updike cites a psychological cause for Kierkegaard’s Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity), as an asset for “indirect communication”

Wikipedia (1) lists Kierkegaard’s alternate identities with minds of their own, but he had not been diagnosed with multiple personality, because of no obvious history of a psychological cause (i.e. childhood trauma, etc).

“This work (The Seducers Diary), a chapter from Kierkegaard’s first major volume, Either/Or, springs from his relationship with his fiancé, Regine Olsen…but then he broke off their engagement…Olsen became a muse for him. His attempt to set right what he felt was a mistake taught him the secret of “indirect communication” (2, back cover).

Comment: I had been puzzled as to why a person with such well-known alternate, writer personalities had never been diagnosed. His dissociative identity, like that of most novelists, was mostly an asset (what I call “Multiple Personality Trait,” not Disorder).

1.Wikipedia. “Søren Kierkegaard.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard

2. Søren Kierkegaard. The Seducer’s Diary with foreword by John Updike. Princeton University Press, 1997. 

Q. What makes Finnegans Wake (1), the novel by James Joyce, difficult to read (1,Wikipedia)?

A. “In this journal article (2), I propose a correlation between James Joyce’s composition techniques that required multiple revisions and his interest in multiple personality, which eventually blossomed into that comedy of multiplicity, Finnegans Wake."

Comment: Although what I call “multiple personality trait” is usually an asset for novelists, it can make a novel hard to understand if not adequately controlled. Also search “James Joyce” in this blog for relevant past posts.

1. Wikipedia. “Finnegans Wake.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake

2. Fordham, Finn. “‘Circe’ and the Genesis of Multiple Personality.” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 3/4, 2008, pp. 507–20. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30244392  

Both Helen Oyeyemi (yesterday’s post) and Joyce Carol Oates (1) have complex multiplicity   

                                                             

“Your struggle with your buried self, or selves, yields your art”…Without these ill-understood drives you might be a superficially happier person…but it isn’t likely that you will create anything of substance (1, p. 24). 

“I acknowledge that I share a name and a face with ‘JCO,’ this expression suggests, but this is a mere convenience. Please don’t be deceived! 'JCO’ is not a person, nor even a personality [in the usual sense] but a process that has resulted in a sequence of texts” (1, p. 153).

Comment: Joyce Carol Oates says her mind is too unusual to call ‘JCO’ a “personality” in the usual sense, but it is not her regular self. Also see old past posts on Joyce Carol Oates.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. The Faith of a Writer (Life Craft Art). NewYork, ECCOHarperCollins, 2004. 

 “A New New Me” by Helen Oyeyemi: “She Has 7 Selves, and They All Have a Story” (1)

Comment: Now, even The New York Times has noticed that some novelists endow their characters with multiple personalities, which, in my opinion, reflects novelists’ relatively common, mentally normal, creative asset, which I call “multiple personality trait.”

1. Jennifer Croft. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/books/review/helen-oyeyemi-new-new-me.html 

2. Helen Oyeyemi. A New New Me. New York, Riverhead Books, 2025.

“Altered” Book 1 of 6 in the Justin Wright Suspense Series by Rob Kaufman

Frank is a new patient of psychiatrist Justin Wright, who asks Frank what makes him nervous:

"It’s worse after I lose time.”

“Lose time?”

“That’s really why I’m here.”
“I definitely have anxiety. Always have. But lately I’ve been losing time. You know, like I start off one place and end up in another without knowing how I got there.” He looked down to the rug and closed his eyes. “I know. It sounds like I’m a fucking lunatic. But I don’t know what to do and you’re my last hope” (1, p. 18).

“He could barely see his reflection, but what he did see made him panic…

“It was almost like the kid staring back at him was someone else. What the hell was going on? He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the chaos barreling around in his skull like a rollercoaster that had gone off the tracks” (1, p. 45).

Comment: This is a six book series by Rob Kaufman, a writer with a degree in psychology. I am positively impressed by his evaluation and diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality) at the beginning of the first volume, from which the above is quoted. I recommend it’s realism regarding the memory gap and mirror symptoms of multiple personality.

1. Rob Kaufman. Altered. (Book 1 of 6), 2022. 

“The Little Paris Bookshop” (post 2) by Nina George (1)

Letters are miniature books. A letter to a man from his lover would surely be read if he loved both her and books. His refusal to read the letter is an inadvertent insult to reading, love, and women…

…Unless the man had multiple personalty, and the particular personality receiving the letter specialized in screening out bad news. Then he might not read the letter, but I doubt that multiple personality is what the author had in mind.

Comment: I’ll look for another novel for my blog’s next post.

1. Nina George. The Little Paris Bookshop. Trans. Simon Pare. New York, Ballantine Books, 2015.

“The Little Paris Bookshop” a novel by Nina George (post 1): Who said or thought the novel’s first line, wrote it in italics, and what did they mean by it?

“How on earth could I have let them talk me into it?” (1, p. 1, line 1).

1. Nina George. The Little Paris Bookshop, Trans. Simon Pare, New York, Ballantine Books, 2015. 

Hello blog visitor: Thousands of people from many countries have visited this blog since 2013, because they, too, wondered if novelists “contain multitudes” and have a creative version of multiple personality.

As a psychiatrist qualified to recognize mental illness, I say that most novelists are not mentally ill, because their “multiple personality trait” helps them to lead productive, meaningful lives. I don’t have multiple personality, but my past clinical experience enabled me to appreciate the real thing.

So I’ll continue this blog whenever I find a novel I’d like to read: Many happy returns. 

"Missing Pieces” by Joy Fielding: Mirror Symptom of Multiple Personality

“Actually I surprise myself sometimes. I’ll be all dressed up, feeling good, thinking I look great, and then I catch my reflection unexpectedly in a store window or a pane of glass, and I think: Who is that? Who is that middle-aged woman? It can’t be me…It’s genuinely frightening when your self-image no longer corresponds to the image you see in the mirror” (1, p. 8). 

Comment: “MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror (3, p. 62). Of course, a high-functioning person (2) for whom multiple personality is a creative asset would not be diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, but might be said to have its creative version, which I call “multiple personality trait.”

1. Joy Fielding. Missing Pieces. New York, Dell Publishing, 1997.

2. Wikipedia. “Joy Fielding.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Fielding

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

Wisdom for Writers by Isabel Allende

“When you feel the story is beginning to pick up rhythm—the characters are shaping up, you can see them, you can hear their voices, and they do things that you haven’t planned, things you couldn’t have imagined—then you know the book is somewhere, and you just have to find it, and bring it, word by word, into the world” (1, pp. 11-12).

Comment: Characters with minds of their own are similar to alternate personalities in multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder). Search “Isabel Allende” in this blog for past posts.

1. Meredith Maran (Editor). Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do. New York, PLUME, 2013. 

 AI Overview of the use of the term “Twisty”

“The term "twisty" has become a popular marketing buzzword, particularly in the thriller genre. While seemingly neutral, it's often used in a way that aligns with and reinforces certain gendered expectations within the book market, particularly in psychological suspense novels marketed primarily towards women.” 

“Society of Lies” by Lauren Ling Brown: Maya, the protagonist, hears a reassuring voice in her head

“Relax. Everything’s fine. Dani is safe. You’re safe. Everyone is safe. Naomi will be here soon” (1, p. 5).

Comment: Above use of italics suggests an optimistic voice in Maya's head. But Maya soon learns that her sister Naomi is dead. And the rest of the novel may uncover the secrets and lies that led to her death.

Added 8/16/25: This novel has unreliable narration, which, as an honest reader, I don’t like, and I will not finish reading it. Moreover, I consider unreliable narration, in and of itself, to be suggestive of multiple personality trait in the author, because it reflects a psychology in which the author may be kept in the dark by her alternate writing personalities. In short, the psychology of this novel, as suggested by its title, is a psychology of lying, which is a common feature of multiple personality (2, pp. 78-79).

1. Lauren Ling Brown. Society of Lies. New York, Bantam, 2025. 

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

“Not Quite Dead Yet” by Holly Jackson: The protagonist makes a life or death decision by heeding an italicized voice in her head, the voice of an alternate personality

“She was listening to her head and her heart, and they both said the same thing…Not now, not now, not now. “I choose the seven days. I want that time. I need it….I’m going to solve my own murder” (1, p. 37).

Comment: The protagonist has to decide whether to put off brain surgery. And she decides by heeding an italicized voice in her head, like a novelist with multiple personality trait, who heeds the voice in her head of an alternate personality. Search "italicized voice” in this blog for past discussions.

Added 8/15/25: Not having heard the voice that the protagonist did, I never became interested in who tried to kill her. But I suppose that many other readers do care.

1. Holly Jackson. Not Quite Dead Yet, New York, Bantam, 2025.

“The Life and Creative Works of Paulo Coelho” by Claude-Hélène Mayer: Is Paulo Coelho a Great, But Typical Novelist?

This scholarly book pays passing attention to Coelho’s Adultery (1, pp. 86-87), the focus of my recent post. That novel suggests that Coelho thinks like a typical novelist, with a creative version of multiple personality, the subject of my blog (2). The novel’s protagonist speaks of hearing an endless dialogue of voices in her head, and compares herself to “Jekyll and Hyde” (a person with multiple personality). Does Paulo Coelho hear conversations of creative alternate personalities?

1. Claude-Hélène Mayer. The Life and Creative Works of Paulo Coelho: A Psychobiography from a Positive Psychology Perspective. Springer International Publishing, 2017.

2. Kenneth A. Nakdimen, MD. https://multiplewriters.blogspot.com/ 

"Adultery” by Paulo Coelho: Protagonist’s and Author's Multiple Personality?

“The way I behave with him is always a surprise. Oral sex, sensible advice, that kiss in the park. I seem like another person. Who is this woman I become whenever I’m with Jacob? (1, p. 55).

“When I finally finish my housework each evening, an endless dialogue starts in my head (1, p. 67).

“I need to know who I’ve become, because I am that person. It’s not something external (1, p. 70).

“On the one side I’m a villain, who goes to a campus to incriminate an innocent person without understanding the motive behind my hatred. On the other, I’m a mother who takes loving care of her family…

“Do you remember Jekyll and Hyde?” (1, p. 136).

Comment: Since multiple personality, per se, is not explicitly invoked for any character, it may reflect a trait of the author. I don’t know if this is present in any of the author’s other novels.

1. Paulo Coelho. Adultery. Trans. By Margaret Jull Costa and Zoë Perry. New York, Vintage International, 2015.