The Blind Spot of Biographers and The Deafness of Interviewers for What Novelists Say about How They Think and How They Write

In my recent post on Edith Wharton, I quoted from Hermione Lee’s “unquestionably authoritative, impressively exhaustive” (from the New York Times Book Review, printed on the cover) 869 page biography. In this biographical standard of excellence, the little paragraph I quoted is all there is about the dissociative, split nature of Edith Wharton’s mind. Edith Wharton stated that that was how her mind worked, and that was how she wrote, but the biographer did not pursue it.

When I was working on my recent post about Paula Hawkins and her #1 bestseller, The Girl on the Train, I listened to a couple of interviews of the author online. At one point in an interview (which was conducted by three interviewers), Ms. Hawkins mentioned that when she was working on the novel, she knew that the writing was really underway when she started to hear the voice of the main character talking to her. To repeat, she had just stated—and it sounded like a routine experience for her when she was writing—that she had had auditory hallucinations, that she had heard voices. But none of the three interviewers asked her about it. It was as though they were deaf or she had never said it.

These are common, not isolated, instances. Most biographers and interviewers know that many novelists say these things. But biographers and interviewers never pursue it.

And as I have previously said, the only likely way for anyone to hear the voices of, get messages from, and have complex interactions with, imaginary people, on an ongoing basis, is to have multiple personality—which is normal if it doesn’t cause them distress or dysfunction, and is an asset if it is part of a creative process, which it obviously is for novelists.