Emily Fox Gordon’s New York Times Book Review of Joyce Carol Oates’ “Lost Landscape” misses the alter egos and amnesia of Oates’ multiple personality

TO THE EDITOR:

In her review of Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir “The Lost Landscape” (Sept. 20), Emily Fox Gordon uses the terms “doppelgängers" and “mirror-self,” suggesting a theme of alter egos.

      Gordon also mentions the chapter “Happy Chicken 1942-1944, which is narrated by Oates’s favorite Rhode Island Red (an arch conceit, but it works)…”

      Let me connect alter egos with Happy Chicken. On page 27 of the memoir, the narrator talks with Joyce:

“Grandma was the one, you know. The one who killed the chickens.”

“No! I did not know.”

“Of course you must have known, Joyce. You must have seen—many times…”

“No. I didn’t know. I never saw.”

“But…”

“I never saw.”

Since Joyce had amnesia for part of those events, the story had to be narrated by an alter ego (an alternate personality), who remembered everything.

KENNETH A. NAKDIMEN

P.S. Gordon says Oates “…found happiness in her engagement and marriage to Raymond Smith [for forty-seven years]. But, oddly enough, no sooner does Oates introduce him to the reader than she abruptly pulls down the narrative curtain. ‘I am sorry,’ she writes, ‘but I am not able to write about Ray here.’ ‘Oh,’ thinks the startled reader, who had been following along sympathetically, ‘I hadn’t meant to pry.’ ”

Now, why, in a memoir about her whole life, was Oates “not able” to discuss anything—and there must have been many good things—about her marriage of forty-seven years (not to mention her remarriage)?

I cannot overemphasize how typical this is for the way persons who have multiple personality tell you their life story. Why? Because each of the person’s personalities may know of, but does not actually remember, the parts of the person’s life that were conducted by other personalities. And, evidently, in Oates’ case, the personality in charge of writing this memoir is not the personality who was in charge of the marriage.

So when the personality in charge of writing this memoir says that she is “not able” to talk about the marriage, she means exactly what she says.

NOTE: Please read Oates’ description of her multiple personality—in quotations from her published nonfiction Journal and other published nonfiction—in last month’s post.