“Elsewhere,” memoir by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo: Mother dialogues with herself and grandmother has child-aged alternate personality.

“I gave myself a good talking-to.”

“ ‘I can’t take it anymore!’ she’d scream…Sometimes these episodes had specific triggers—a raise or bonus at work that she expected but that didn’t come through…But more often what she couldn’t take anymore was vague…Wild eyed, she’d often fix her gaze on me and ask unanswerable questions: ‘Don’t I deserve a life?…

“By the time I was in high school, though, this much had become clear: in fact, nothing was going to happen…Because the result was the same every time she had one of these meltdowns. The morning after…‘Ah, Ricko-Mio,’ she sighed, using her pet name for me. ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.’ She’d give my hand a reassuring pat. ‘Last night, after you went to bed, I gave myself a good talking-to.’

“That phrase always gave me the willies…I’d never given myself a good talking-to. For that to happen there would have to be two of me, and I was always one…There was simply no other me to assume the talked-to position…Somehow, my mother was able to do that. More bizarrely still, it worked. It just didn’t last” (1, pp. 44-46).

“I hurt me.”

“One of my most vivid early memories of my grandmother had to do with her ongoing battles with milk. She preferred milk in bottles, but when home delivery ceased she had no choice but to switch to supermarket cartons, which she invariably tried to squeeze open at the wrong side, then attacked with a dull paring knife. Like my mother, once embarked upon a particular course of action, however misguided, she was incapable of reversing it, and the consequences could be explosive, even bloody…When I asked what happened, she’d show me her punctured thumb or wrist and say, in the voice of a little girl, ‘I hurt me’…

“…my grandmother’s syntax, as well as the little-girl cadence she used only when she’d injured herself, creeped me out. She never said I hurt myself but rather I hurt me, as if me and I were different people entirely, and the one holding the paring knife had stabbed an innocent bystander…I’d also linked my otherwise sane grandmother’s short-lived but recurring bouts of madness to whatever it was that possessed my mother from time to time. I’d be much older before I began to see the good talkings-to my mother was always giving herself as somehow related to my grandmother’s ‘I hurt me’—both implying a divided or fractured self…” (1, pp. 146-147).

1. Richard Russo. Elsewhere, a memoir. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.