Novelist Isabel Allende said in interviews that she was a liar: The Paradox of the Honest Liar, a Clue to Multiple Personality

Allende: I remember always having told stories—and making them up and inventing and exaggerating and lying all the time.

Interviewer: Lying?

Allende: Yes, they were not lies for me because I thought those things really happened, but my mother says I was a terrible liar. I was always punished for lying.

Interviewer: How would you describe the difference between lies and truth?

Allende: For me, I can no longer say…For example, I just went to Switzerland and I received an award. It was a bronze statue. I no longer know what size the bronze statue is. When I received it I think it was more or less like this (holds hands a foot apart), but then I started telling the story and now it is this big (arms open wide). Very soon it will be a monument. [1, pp. 115-116]

She has a good sense of humor, but don’t let that obscure her serious, lifelong concern with lying.

The obvious problem with Allende’s explanation is that she (the host personality, who is doing this interview) actually does recall the original, true size of the bronze statue. The only way her explanation could make sense would be if the exaggerations in her stories were honestly believed by a separate, story narrator, personality, and it was the latter personality whom her mother and others would accuse of lying.

“So many times I don’t remember people’s names, or the places I have been…I don’t remember the names of the men I have married. At times I even forget the names of my own children…They had always told me that I was a liar…” ( 1, p. 218).

This is seen with a person who has multiple personality, in which life experiences are divided among the separate memory banks of different personalities.

“I have a terrible memory. I’m always inventing my own life, so I find that in different interviews I tell different stories about the same subject…The truth is I’m a born liar” (1, pp. 288-289).

This reminds me of when William Faulkner (see past post) warned interviewers not to ask him personal questions, because he might give different answers when future interviewers ask him the same question.

“…I have a special voice for storytelling, a voice that, although mine, also seems to belong to someone else…” (2, p.  227). When writing, she is “transformed into a multifaceted being, reproduced to infinity, seeing my own reflection in multiple mirrors, living countless lives, speaking with many voices. The characters became so real that they invaded the house…” (2, p. 263).

“We learn early on to wear masks we change so frequently that we are no longer able to identify our own faces in the mirror” (3, p. xiv-xv). [My novel Eva Luna] “is dotted with autobiographical observations about the practice of writing” (3, p. 63). [People with multiple personality may have a problem with mirrors. Search “mirrors” in this blog.]

If you are new to this blog, you might think that all the above about lying, memory, and mirrors are just some idiosyncrasies of Isabel Allende, and have no wider significance.  But these same issues have come up with many of the other novelists discussed in this blog. For relevant prior posts in this blog, search: liar; lying; duplicity; mirror; memory.

In conclusion, whenever you have a person who has a reputation for being a liar, or even admits to having repeatedly lied, but this doesn’t make sense to you, because the person seems to be a basically honest and moral person—in short, the paradox of an honest liar—the solution to this mystery may be multiple personality, in which different personalities have different memory banks and different views of reality; which has been seen previously in this blog’s discussion of other great novelists.

1. John Rodden (ed). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

2. Isabel Allende. Eva Luna. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

3. Celia Correas Zapata. Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Houston, Arte Publico Press, 2002

Isabel Allende: Quotations on Creative Writing, Consistent with Multiple Identity Literary Theory

“First of all, I have the feeling that I don’t invent [my characters]. I don’t create them; they are there. They are somewhere in the shadows, and when I start writing—it’s a very long process; sometimes it takes years to write a book—little by little they come out of the shadow into the light. But when they come into the light, they are already people. They have their own personalities, their clothes, their voices, their textures, their smells. I don’t invent them; somehow they are there. They always were there” (1, p. 258).

One of her best-known characters, Eva Luna, “is the woman I want to be. We are so different, in every way but one: we both tell stories. But she is my dreamself” (1, p. 273). She “was always there. I know that the character was within me. She doesn’t resemble me; it’s not my biography. I’m not her. But somehow she was inside me…By writing, [the character] got out of me and existed by itself…So that’s my relationship with my characters—very strange and very powerful. [Sometimes they come out right away, fully formed, and she can’t change them even if she wants to]…sometimes they [start out] ambiguous, but by the end they are so real that my children play with the idea that they are living in the house. And we talk about them as if they were part of the family” (1, p. 259).

Once a novel is started, she hates to interrupt the writing process. For example: “Now, while I’m here in Toronto, the voices keep on talking and I’m not there to take them down. I feel like a traitor when I’m not writing” (1, p. 275).

“I spend ten, twelve hours a day alone in a room writing. I don’t talk to anybody; I don’t answer the telephone. I’m just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me, voices that talk through me. I’m creating a world that is fiction but that doesn’t belong to me. I’m not God there; I’m just an instrument” (1, p. 290).

When she starts one of her novels, does she invent the first sentence?

“When I’ve lighted the candles and turned on the computer, I write the first sentence, which I let bubble up from my intuitions, not from reason. That first sentence opens the door to the story that’s already there—only it’s hidden in another dimension. It’s my task to enter that dimension and to make the story appear. When I wrote the first sentence of The House of the Spirits, which is “Barrabas came to us from the sea,” I didn’t yet know who Barrabas was or why he had come…It’s something magical that I can’t explain very well, because I don’t control it myself” (1, p. 295).

If you are new to this blog, you might think that the above sounds weird, but it’s not; it’s rather typical. The details are unique to Isabel Allende, but the general process is similar to what I have previously quoted from Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, J. M. Barrie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and other great writers.

This is the psychology of great writers and the process of creative writing, but you wouldn’t know it from other literary theories.

1. John Rodden (ed.). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Translations by Virginia Invernizzi and John Rodden. Foreword by Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

Who wrote The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? Would Agatha Christie have made Marple and Poirot vouch for an unreliable narrator/murderer?

It is unlikely that the same personality who wrote most of Agatha Christie’s novels wrote this one, since both Caroline Sheppard (the prototype for Miss Marple) and Hercule Poirot are employed to establish the credibility of Dr. Sheppard, the narrator/murderer.

Caroline establishes his credibility by knowing him his whole life (they are siblings), and currently living with him, yet detecting nothing more about him than that he is “weak.” Poirot, through most of this novel, refers to him as a substitute Hastings, his former, trustworthy sidekick (like Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Watson).

Whose idea was it to write a detective novel with an unreliable narrator? It was suggested to Agatha Christie by two people. James Watts said, “Why not have a Watson do the murder?” And Lord Louis Mountbattan “did not merely offer the device but explained exactly how it should be used. Agatha very rarely took advice on her plots…And only she could have pulled it off so completely. Only she had the requisite control, the willingness to absent herself from the authorial scene and let the plot shine clear” (1, p. 155).

My theory is that, when these suggestions were made, they were responded to by one of Agatha Christie’s personalities who, ordinarily, would have taken the role of a villain. In short, this novel was mostly written by the Dr. Sheppard personality, just as it appears to be.

This is not to say that regular Agatha Christie did not also participate. For example, on the first page of the novel, she may have made Dr. Sheppard begin two sentences with the phrase “To tell the truth” (2), which implies that he is a liar.

1. Laura Thompson. Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. Headline Review, 2007.

2. Agatha Christie. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery [1926]. New York, Black Dog & Leventhal, [?].

Literary Voice and Personality are much the same thing, but it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that fact in literary theory.

Some people talk of writers' finding their one true voice. Others say that writers can, and do, have many voices.

But everyone would agree that the writer’s characters must each have their own voice, and that the characters must have voices that differ from each other.

So, one way or another, most writers and literary theorists acknowledge that writers have multiple voices.

Now, the thing is, there is no basic difference between voice and personality. “Voice” is a euphemism for “personality.” Why is there a need for euphemism? Because people are comfortable with the idea that writers have multiple voices, but not with the idea that writers have multiple personalities.

In my last post, I pointed out that a book by Agatha Christie had a different authorial voice from that of two books by Mary Westmacott (a pseudonym for Agatha Christie). And people who read that post may have thought, “So what. A writer had two voices? Is that news?”

Well, if you think of it in terms of voice, it is not news. But if you realize that voice is personality, it is.

Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd: Written by Mary Westmacott’s Alternate Personality

This Hercule Poirot mystery is one of Agatha Christie’s most celebrated and analyzed novels. It is famous—some would say, notorious—for being a detective story with an unreliable narrator.

I am, if not the only one, then certainly one of the few, to have read it shortly after reading two novels by Mary Westmacott, Agatha Christie’s pseudonym (see previous posts). This juxtaposition led me to notice a peculiar difference: The two Westmacott novels had characters with whom it was easy to sympathize or empathize, but The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had characters who were strange.

The main Westmacott characters were like real people with real feelings. In Unfinished Portrait, Celia had a touching relationship with her mother. Even the villain, her unfaithful husband, was at least understandable in terms of common human emotions. In Absent in the Spring, I could sympathize with both Joan—who didn’t understand herself or her family, but who always tried to do the right thing—and her long-suffering husband.

The main Christie characters are the narrator, Dr. Sheppard, the village physician; his spinster sister, Caroline, with whom he lives; Hercule Poirot, a famous detective, who has recently retired to this quaint English village; the wealthy victim, Roger Ackroyd; and the obvious suspects, Ackroyd’s family, friends, and employees.

If I had not just read the Westmacott novels, in which the characters are portrayed with sensitivity and psychological understanding, I might have accepted the Christie novel’s world at face value. After all, it is a plot-driven, murder mystery, detective story. But even given the genre, its characters are remarkably strange and two-dimensional.

For example, Caroline Sheppard is an amateur detective, with a network of informants throughout the village (household staff, milkmen, etc.). Much is made of how she always knows what has happened before everyone else does. Indeed, in later Christie novels, she became Miss Marple. Yet in this novel, she is depicted as living with the murderer, her brother, but being one of the last to know.

In a Hercule Poirot Mystery, like this, the most admirable character should be Hercule Poirot. But at the end of this novel, the night before Poirot will expose the murderer to the police—and when he has just made it explicitly clear to the murderer that this will happen tomorrow morning—the author has Poirot suggest to the murderer that he might prefer to overdose with sleeping pills tonight, and so avoid tomorrow’s messy unpleasantness for himself and his family. This portrays Poirot as having a greater sense of neatness than of justice.

In short, the world of Mary Westmacott has people with normal human feelings, which may get tragic or messy, but which are sympathetic and make sense. In contrast, the world of Agatha Christie (at least, in this novel) is a kind of dystopia in which people are strange.

This illustrates that pseudonyms may be used by novelists to accommodate the existence in the writer of more than one distinct narrative voice; in other words, multiple narrative personalities.

Agatha Christie. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery [1926]. New York, Black Dog & Leventhal, [?].

Agatha Christie’s Absent in the Spring: Contrasts Novelist’s Double Consciousness (Multiple Personality) with Ordinary Imagination

Absent in the Spring is another of Agatha Christie’s novels written under her pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. But in this one, the wife (Joan), not the husband (Rodney), is at fault. Joan realizes that she had never understood her husband, their three children, or herself.

This novel is of interest here, because it illustrates the distinctly different kinds of imagination in people with, and people without, multiple personality.

Joan illustrates the kind of imagination in persons with multiple personality (not that multiple personality is intended to be an issue in this novel. It isn’t.):

“Really, some inner voice in her exclaimed, you are talking like a hospital nurse. What do you think you are, Joan Scudamore? an invalid? a mental case? And why do you feel so proud of yourself and yet so tired? Is there anything extraordinary in having passed a pleasant, normal morning?” (1, pp. 124-125).

“She mustn’t think of Joan Scudamore. But that’s myself! No, it isn’t. Yes it is…Odd the feeling that there was someone walking with her. Someone she knew quite well. If she turned her head…well, she had turned her head but there was no one. No one at all. Yet the feeling that there was someone persisted. It frightened her” (1, p. 128). (No wonder the theme of the double is sometimes presented as a ghost story.)

The above describes dual or double consciousness, which is the simplest case of multiple personality. There is a voice of a second consciousness. The voice has a mind of its own. Also, Joan senses another person walking with her. Sometimes the personalities alternate—either one is present or the other—but at other times they are both present, talking and walking with each other.

In contrast, husband Rodney—who had had a platonic relationship with a now deceased woman, Leslie—has imagined Leslie during the six weeks that Joan has been away:

“…And Leslie’s face. He couldn’t remember her face clearly…And yet for the last six weeks she had sat there [for parts of] every day and talked to him. Just fantasy, of course. He had invented a pseudo Leslie, and put her in the chair, and put words into her mouth. He had made her say what he wanted her to say…It had been, he thought, a very happy six weeks” (1, p. 179).

Two things to note: First, Rodney couldn’t vividly visualize Leslie the way novelists can sometimes visualize their characters and the way people with multiple personality can sometimes visualize their alternate personalities. Second, Rodney was in full control of the fantasy. He put the words in her mouth. In contrast, a novelist’s characters or a person’s alternate personalities have minds of their own.

1. Mary Westmacott [pseudonym of Agatha Christie]. Absent in the Spring [1944]. Bantam Books, 1992.

Agatha Christie’s Autobiography: “The Girls,” not just imaginary companions, lived on, but never grew old, since child-aged alternate personalities, like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, don’t

Yesterday’s post discussed the “the girls” as they were portrayed in a novel written by Agatha Christie under a pseudonym. This post is about “the girls” as discussed by Agatha Christie in her autobiography, which she wrote between ages sixty and seventy-five.

It is the same seven girls, including Isabella, whom Agatha did not like, because she was too “worldly” (1, p. 90). But here, instead of discussing the personal conflict in terms of music, it is discussed in terms of croquet.

“I used to arrange tournaments and special matches. My great hope was that Isabel would not win. I did everything short of cheating to see that she did not win—that is, I held her mallet for her carelessly, played quickly, hardly aimed at all—yet somehow the more carelessly I played, the more fortunate Isabel seemed to be. She got through impossible hoops, hit balls from right across the lawn, and nearly always finished as winner or runner-up. It was most annoying” (1, p. 91).

“‘The girls,’ I may say, stayed with me for many years…Even when I was grown up I spared them a thought now and then, and allocated them the various dresses in my wardrobe…Even now, sometimes, as I put away a dress in a cupboard, I say to myself: ‘Yes, that would do for well for Elsie, green was always her colour.’ It makes me laugh when I do it, but there ‘the girls’ are still, though, unlike me, they have not grown old” (1, pp. 91-92).

As I have previously discussed in regard to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, child-aged alternate personalities may never grow old.

1. Agatha Christie. An Autobiography. New York, Dodd Mead & Company, 1977.

Agatha Christie’s Unfinished Portrait: “The Girls”—alternate personalities that the main character had from age 10 to 19—are an example of Gratuitous Multiple Personality

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that the main character, Celia, from age ten to nineteen, had a private relationship with about seven imaginary girls. Note: age ten to nineteen is older than ordinary imaginary companions.

“The girls” are described as being more real to Celia than her real friends. And Celia would be absorbed in scenarios with these imaginary girls for hours on end. Indeed, her mother had to prohibit her from playing with “the girls” for more than three hours at a time (1, p. 103).

Each of “the girls” had her own name, age, and abilities. On rainy days “the girls gave a concert in the schoolroom, different pieces being allotted to them. It annoyed Celia very much that her fingers stumbled over Ethel’s piece…and that though she always allotted Isabella the most difficult, it went perfectly” (1, p. 102). Apparently, then, Celia was switching from one personality to another, and would have the ability characteristic of each personality—she had more musical ability when she was Isabella than when she was Ethel—as is typical in multiple personality.

Thus, Celia is being described as having multiple personality. But why is this in the book? It has no relation to the plot. It does not help explain Celia’s motivation. The author had no intention of raising the issue of multiple personality, per se. It is what I call “gratuitous multiple personality,” meaning that it is in the book only because it was part of the author’s personal experience.

1. Mary Westmacott [pseudonym of Agatha Christie]. Unfinished Portrait [1934]. New York, Jove Books, 1987.

Agatha Christie’s Unfinished Portrait Describes Lifelong, Normal, Multiple Personality as Leading to Both her Literary Career and "Gone Girl" Fugue

Agatha Christie’s discussion of her mysterious, sensational, real-life disappearance in 1926—see my post of October 5, 2014—was not in her autobiography, but in Unfinished Portrait, one of the novels she published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

The novel tells the story of Celia.

Age 3: “Nobody knew that as Celia walked sedately along the road she was in reality mounted upon a white palfrey…She was on different occasions a duchess, a princess, a goose girl, and a beggar maid…Most of her world was inside her head” (1, p. 33-34).

That is, she switched into the subjectively-real identities of a duchess, etc., and experienced herself as having these alternate personalities for various periods of time. This is usually lumped together with “imaginary companions” or “imaginary playmates” or “imaginary friends,” but, to be more precise, this was imaginary impersonation (in which the child switches into alternate personalities).

Age 5½: “Celia displayed an insatiable curiosity about words…By the time she was five and a half Celia could read all the story books…Fairy stories were her passion. Stories of real-life children did not interest her” (1, p. 40).

Age 10-19: “Celia still spent much of her time alone. Although she had [real friends to tea]—they were not nearly so real to her as ‘the girls’ [which] were creations of Celia’s imagination. She knew all about them—what they looked like, what they wore, what they felt and thought” (1, p. 101-102) They included Ethelred Smith, Annie Brown, Isabella Sullivan, Ella Graves, and Sue de Vete. At age 19, when Celia herself was engaged to be married, “she married off ‘the girls’” (1, p. 172).

Age 24: “Celia invented a new person. Her name was Hazel,” and also a young man, Owen (1, p. 221). “Whenever Celia had a little leisure, or when she was wheeling [her daughter] to the Park, [their] story went on in her mind. It occurred to her one day that she might write it down. She might, in fact, make a book of it…It wasn’t quite so easy when it came to writing it down. Her mind had always gone on about six paragraphs farther than the one she was writing down—and then by the time she got to that, the exact wording had gone out of her head” (1, pp. 221-222).

Then, when she had had some initial success in getting published, and there appeared to be no problem in her family life, her husband shocked her by announcing that he had found someone new and he wanted a divorce.

Celia’s Fugue: “She walked for a long time—it was raining and wet…She couldn’t remember what she was walking for…What was her own name? How frightening—she couldn’t remember…” (1, p. 261).

The writing career and fugue are mentioned only very briefly. But the novel is interesting for its portrait of the psychological development, since early childhood, of a person who could have a real writing career, and, in a crisis, a real fugue.

Why did “Mary Westmacott” write about this, and not Agatha Christie? Maybe Agatha Christie never did remember what happened, but her Mary Westmacott personality did.

1. Mary Westmacott [pseudonym of Agatha Christie]. Unfinished Portrait [1934]. New York, Jove Books, 1987.

Character-Driven vs. Plot-Driven vs. Philosophical Fiction: Does Multiple Identity Literary Theory apply to novels of ideas? Do any novelists completely understand their characters?

Multiple Identity Literary Theory says that novelists have a normal version of multiple personality; that they use it to write novels; and that their characters are alternate personalities.

At first, I thought this theory would apply to character-driven novels, but not to plot-driven novels. But then I realized that plot-driven novels could be just as character-driven; e.g., detective novels, like those of Sue Grafton. My theory would apply to them, too.

But what about philosophical fiction, novels of ideas? Are they neither character-driven nor plot-driven, but idea-driven? Would my theory apply?

I don’t know, and I have no such novel currently in mind.

This post is prompted by my recent assertion that Gillian Flynn didn’t understand that her character in Gone Girl has multiple personality. I believe what I said, but feel bad about saying it, in case it hurt her feelings.

However, based on what I’ve read and written for this blog, I doubt that most novelists have a complete understanding of their characters. Because their characters are not constructed puppets, but [one or more] alternate personalities, who have minds of their own.

Is it different in philosophical fiction? I don’t know.

Maureen Dowd’s “Lady Psychopaths Welcome,” in today’s New York Times, Quotes Gillian Flynn on Gone Girl: But Neither Dowd nor Flynn Understand Flynn’s Character

Dowd quotes Flynn as saying, “The whole point is that these are two people pretending to be other people, better people, versions of the dream guy and dream girl. But each one couldn’t keep it up, so they destroy each other.”

This confirms what I said in my three posts of October 4th and 5th 2014, that Flynn didn’t understand her character. And Dowd’s essay only compounds the misunderstanding.

If you are interested, and haven’t already read them, please scroll down and read those three posts, which explain what was really going on.

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, feels like he has “a double,” and writes a novel about a man whose identity is in pieces

In regard to winning the Nobel Prize, Mr. Modiano said, “It felt like looking at a double, as if we were celebrating somebody who had my name.” (quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal)

“His most famous works include Missing Person, an existential thriller about a man who travels the world trying to piece together his identity.” (from today’s New York Times)

Textbooks on Literary Theory have no theory for the Theme of the Double, Metaphor of Multiple Personality; Psychoanalytic Theory is Antithetical

Most college courses and textbooks on literary theory do not address the theme of the double. And those that do usually make the mistake of including it in the chapter or lecture on psychoanalytic literary theory (probably because of Otto Rank’s The Double, a Psychoanalytic Study).

But the truth is that psychoanalytic theory is antithetical to multiple personality, and that Freud, himself, did not make the obvious connection between the literary double and multiple personality. This is illustrated by Freud’s own analysis of E.T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” a famous theme-of-the-double, multiple personality, story. (Search “sandman” in this blog.)

Why did Freud fail to make the connection between the theme of the double and multiple personality? Why are psychoanalytic theory and multiple personality antithetical?

Because Freudian theory wrongly assumes that everyone’s mind has only one consciousness; whereas, multiple personality involves multiple consciousness: In multiple personality, whenever one personality is “out” (in control of overt behavior), one or more other personalities are fully conscious—are “co-conscious”—behind the scenes.

This is not just theoretical. Clinically, in multiple personality, whenever you speak to one of a person’s personalities, later conversations with certain of their other personalities reveal that they had been eavesdropping.

Another example of multiple consciousness—the essence of multiple personality—is when fiction writers communicate with their characters. They find that their characters know things, think things, and have opinions that differ from their own. This demonstrates that the regular self and the characters are simultaneously and independently conscious. They are all parts of one person’s mind, but that person’s mind has multiple consciousness.

If you think I’m wrong about college courses and textbooks, please submit corrective comments. If I’m not wrong, then Multiple Identity Literary Theory should be added to the curriculum. Especially since theme-of-the-double/multiple personality is surprisingly common in literature. In fact, writers often include it, not for literary, but for personal, reasons. (Search “gratuitous multiple personality.”)

Eudora Welty, Charles Dickens, and Sue Grafton are not weird; they are normal fiction writers, says Multiple Identity Literary Theory

Interviewer: Do you mean you sound out a story when you write it?

Eudora Welty: I just hear it when I’m writing it. It comes to me that way. In everything I read. I hear the voice of I know not Who. Not my voice. I hear everything being read to me as I read it off the page (1, p. 269).

Eudora Welty: I write for the sake of the story. The story is everything. I am just the instrument (1, p. 346).

Interviewer: Please talk about how you feel or the state you’re in when you’re hard at work on a story or a novel.

Eudora Welty: I think you’re unconscious of the state you’re in, because you’re not thinking about yourself…The work teaches you about the work ahead…What your mind does is so peculiar…It was on automatic drive…

Interviewer: It was as if, at some level in you, the whole thing was there, and pieces were just floating up…

Eudora Welty: It was really weird. The mind is very strange (2, pp. 173-175).

Eudora Welty says that she hears a voice of someone—she doesn’t know who is speaking—but she’s sure it’s not her own voice. She, herself, is the tool or instrument of the story that is provided to her. Her own mind, controlled by the voice and story, is on automatic. It’s as if the story was already there and floats up to her consciousness.

Welty says that the creative writing process is “weird” and “the mind is very strange.” But readers of this blog know that Welty is not weird or strange, because we have heard other great fiction writers say similar things. To cite two examples: Charles Dickens confided that he, himself, did not “invent” his characters and stories. And Sue Grafton says that she has several personalities, that her novels seem to exist before she writes them, and that she just “discovers” them.

Multiple Identity Literary Theory says that these writers are not weird, strange, or crazy. They have a normal, literary version of multiple personality, and make professional use of it.

1. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (ed). Conversations with Eudora Welty. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1984.

2. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (ed). More Conversations with Eudora Welty. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

Writing Novels: If you don’t think like the novelists discussed in this blog, should you even try to write a novel?

In a post last year—search “Where I’m Coming From”—I gave half the story of how I came to write this blog. The other half is that I was planning a novel.

There were two main characters, a woman and a man. The woman was a feminist bioengineer; the man, a psychiatrist. The story was to have been, first, about her secret project to change humanity; second, about their relationship; and third, about his interest in multiple personality and literature, which might have been used as comic relief.

However, the more I have learned about how novelists think and how novels are actually written, the more futile I think it would be for me to make the attempt. I could do it, but I doubt that it would be the real thing.

Are there any great novelists who do not think like the novelists discussed in this blog? If you know of any, please tell me.

Online Search of “Gillian Flynn Agatha Christie”: The Connection Between Flynn’s Gone Girl and Hitchcock’s Psycho

I just searched “Gillian Flynn Agatha Christie,” and found that Christie’s disappearance is still well known, and people have related it to Flynn’s Gone Girl. Moreover, Flynn is reported to have said that Christie is her favorite mystery writer.

Gillian Flynn is also reported to have said in interviews that, as a child, she watched Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho many times. And she practiced imitating the facial expression of its main character.

However, in my brief search of the above, they failed to mention the key connection between Flynn’s Gone Girl and Hitchcock’s Psycho: They are both about characters with multiple personality.

Agatha Christie, the Original “Gone Girl”: Her Famous Real-Life Fugue, a Common Symptom of Multiple Personality

On December 3, 1926, Agatha Christie—today the best-selling novelist of all time, with an estimated two-four billion, yes billion, books sold—disappeared. Earlier that year, she had published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of her most successful books ever. But she had recently discovered that her husband was having an affair with a younger woman named Nancy Neele.

That morning, her husband had “confessed that he was in love with Miss Neele and wanted to marry her. He asked Agatha to divorce him…and left home to spend the weekend with Miss Neele” (1, p. 51).

That evening, Mrs. Christie left home in her car, leaving one letter for her secretary to cancel her appointments and another letter for the Deputy Chief Constable saying that she feared for her life. Her car was found abandoned at the side of a road. She was missing for over a week. And it was a major news event, with a massive search to find her.

Finally, a musician at a hotel informed the police of his suspicion that a guest at the hotel, registered under the name of “Mrs. Neele,” was in fact Mrs. Christie. When a newspaper reporter confronted “Mrs. Neele,” she admitted that she was Mrs. Christie, but said she could not remember how she got to the hotel. However, when her husband arrived, he said that she did not know him or where she was. Two doctors, a neurologist and a general practitioner, affirmed that Mrs. Christie really did have amnesia (1, p. 56).

“The week before her disappearance, Agatha Christie had lost a diamond ring at Harrods. She wrote to [the department store]…describing the ring and asking that, if it were found, it be sent to Mrs Teresa Neele” [at the hotel where she was found after her disappearance, and] Harrods did, in fact, return Mrs Christie’s ring to Mrs Neele” (1, p. 56).

One way to interpret this story would be that Agatha Christie planned this disappearance, and pretended this fugue, to embarrass her husband for his infidelity. Another interpretation would be that she was a person with multiple personality, who, as a way to cope with her husband’s infidelity, developed a new personality with the same last name as her husband’s mistress.

The second interpretation is based on two things. First, the disappearance was predictably more embarrassing to her than to her husband, since it made him look unfaithful (but only to the relatively few who knew of his affair), while it made her look crazy (to the general public). Second, fugues are one of the most common symptoms of multiple personality. A routine screening question for multiple personality is, “Have you ever found yourself some place, but couldn’t remember how you got there?” The person (regular personality; Mrs. Christie) doesn’t recall how she got to the hotel, because it was her alternate personality (Mrs. Neele) who travelled to the hotel and registered there. The situation with the ring would indicate that the disappearance was premeditated by the Mrs. Neele personality. Perhaps the latter wanted to embarrass Mr. Christie.

I may have more to say about Agatha Christie in the future. But I wrote this post now, because I think it is relevant to yesterday’s post about Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which was also about the disappearance by a wife after her husband was unfaithful.

1. Charles Osborne. The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1982/2001.

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl: The Author Doesn’t Know That Her Character Has Multiple Personality

Amy discovers that her husband, Nick, is unfaithful. To take revenge, she leaves home—thus the title, Gone Girl—and stages her disappearance to look like he has killed her and disposed of the body.

So it is astoundingly inconsistent when Amy tells the reader that she is planning to kill herself, and will do so in a way that her body will never be found. Why would she kill herself after successfully taking revenge? And if she is going to kill herself anyway, why not ensure Nick’s conviction for murder by providing her dead body to the police?

If you haven’t read Gone Girl, you might wonder how a story with such amateurish inconsistencies could get published. But if you recall my post on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, you can guess the answer. The novel is otherwise so well written that the reader ignores or makes excuses for the inconsistencies.

Now, when I say that the author doesn’t know that Amy has multiple personality, I must qualify that statement by saying that the author has partial insight, and sometimes seems to be intentionally providing clues to Amy’s multiple personality. For example, Nick recalls that Amy had once taken singing lessons from a Paula, and knew a Jessie from a fashion-design course. “But then I’d ask about Jessie or Paula a month later, and Amy would look at me like I was making up words” (1, p. 46). This implies that Amy’s regular personality had amnesia for what her singing and fashion-design personalities had been doing.

Amy says, “The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities…I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they’re too lazy or stupid to pull off a switch” (1, p. 222).

And Nick is not totally oblivious to Amy’s deep changeability. He says, “She’s like this endless archeological dig: You think you’ve reached the final layer, and then you bring down your pick one more time, and you break through to a whole new mine shaft beneath. With a maze of tunnels and bottomless pits” (1, pp.253-254).

At one point, Amy distinguishes between two personalities, herself and another “I,” who has come into play since she faked her death. She says, speaking about a man named Jeff: “I wonder if ‘I’ might like sleeping with him” (1, p. 282). “I have absolutely no intention of being part of this illicit piscine economy, but ‘I’ am fairly interested. How many women can say they were part of a fish-smuggling ring? ’I’ am game. I have become game again since I died…‘I’ can do pretty much anything. A ghost has that freedom” (1, p. 286). Note: She has become game again, meaning that this other “I” personality, who is game for things that her regular self isn’t, had been present in the past, before she staged her death.

Why, then, do I say that Gillian Flynn has only partial insight to Amy’s multiple personality? After all, she has Amy explicitly say (see above), “I change personalities.” But she then says—like Philip Roth in his Paris Review interview (see past post)—“I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it.”

Well, it may be fair to say that “most people” do this (have multiple personality) if by “people” you are referring to novelists only. As I have previously said, I would guess that 90% of novelists have multiple personality (a normal version of it). But most of the general public don’t (only 30% has the normal version, and 1.5% the mental disorder).

In the last third of the novel, Gillian Flynn does not make a point of Amy’s multiple personality. (Except that Amy abruptly changes her mind and doesn’t kill herself, since, evidently, only one of her personalities was suicidal.) This suggests that the author’s earlier clues and references to multiple personality were just her conception of normal psychology, based on knowing herself, another great novelist. [At the time this post was written, the blog was called, "Great Novelists have Multiple Personality.]

1. Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl. New York, Crown Publishers, 2012.

Blog on Multiple Identity Literary Theory, visited from around the world, widely discussed

Here is how to refer to it:

Theory: Multiple Identity Literary Theory

Blog: Great Novelists have Multiple Personality

URL: multiplewriters.blogspot.com

Author: Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D.

NOTE: Please always include my middle initial.

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