E. L. Doctorow says “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia” (meaning multiple personality), and he has had “two minds” since age nine.

In his Paris Review interview (1), Doctorow says “Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author’s. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book.”

The interviewer asks, “Does that change you at all? The voice, for example, in Loon Lake is very different from the voice in Ragtime. Do you change…yourself?…sitting around the house you don’t behave like Joe of Paterson, for example, the hobo in Loon Lake.”

Doctorow replies, “Well, how do you know? Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia” [multiple personality].

Doctorow is saying that he experiences multiple personality when he writes. But does he mean it is merely a literary technique that he uses, or does he mean that he has a normal version of multiple personality, and has had it since childhood?

Doctorow explains, “I really started to think of myself as a writer when I was about nine. Whenever I read anything I seemed to identify as much with the act of composition as with the story. I seemed to have two minds: I would love the story and want to know what happened next, but at the same time I would somehow be aware of what was being done on the page. I identified myself as a kind of younger brother of the writer. I was on hand to help him figure things out.”

Thus, as early as age nine, Doctorow experienced himself as having at least “two minds.” While his regular personality attended to what was happening in the story he was reading, his other personality, his writer personality, who felt like “a kind of younger brother” of the story’s author, and who attended to “the act of composition,” was "on hand to help [the author] figure things out.”

1. George Plimpton (interviewer). “E. L. Doctorow, The Art of Fiction No. 94.” The Paris Review, Winter 1986, No. 101.