Richard Russo’s memoir “Elsewhere” (postscript): He may not have conceptualized the self-dividedness of mother and grandmother as multiple personality.

In yesterday’s post, the quotes from his memoir may have made it seem like he conceptualized, what both his mother and grandmother had, in terms of multiple personality. But the rest of the memoir suggests that he did not think of it that way.

He may have been impressed by the psychological fact that people could be self-divided, and he might incorporate that knowledge in his novels, but he might do so without thinking of it in terms of multiple personality, per se.

And his having knowledge of multiple personality only by observation of others, and not from his own personal experience, would be a cautionary lesson for Multiple Identity Literary Theory, the thesis of this blog: When unintentional multiple personality is found in a novel, it would not necessarily reflect the author’s own psychology. It could reflect the psychology of people the author has known.

However, that would be a problem for my theory, since part of the theory is that the writer uses his own multiple personality in his creative writing process; for example, characters, to the extent that they come alive for the writer and have minds of their own, are equivalent to alternate personalities.

So I wonder if Russo is as different from his mother and grandmother in this regard as he thinks. Perhaps he, too, has multiple personality, but in his case, it is the normal version.