Siri Hustvedt, an eminent writer (1), says her name is Legion, hears voices, feels plural, can inhabit both men and women, sees a stranger in the mirror.

“…all those jabbering voices every fiction writer hears in his or her head. Writing novels is a solitary act that is also plural…” (2, p. 42).

“When I write fiction, I also leave my real body behind and become someone else, another woman or a man if I wish. For me, making art has always been a kind of conscious dreaming. The material for a story comes not from what I know but from what I don’t know, from impulses and images that often seem to happen without my directives…” (2, p. 96).

“When I write a book, I am also listening. I hear characters talk as if they were outside me rather than inside me…and I am free to inhabit both men and women and to tell their stories” (2, p. 103).

“Around the age of eleven, I suffered commanding inner voices and rhythms that terrified me with their insistence. They always came when I was alone, and they seemed to want to impose their will on me, to press my body into their marching orders. The danger of madness seemed very real to me then, and I’m lucky they vanished” (2, p. 199-200).

“…I was standing in the tiny student room I had rented, and I turned to look at myself in the small mirror over the sink. I knew the person I was looking at was myself, and yet there was an alien quality to my reflection, an otherness that brought with it feelings of exuberance and celebration. All at once, I was looking at a stranger” (2, p. 221-222).

“Is the wounded self the writing self? Is the writing self an answer to the wounded self?…The writing self is multiple and elastic…is restless and searching, and it listens for voices. Where do they come from, these chatterers who talk to me before I fall asleep? My characters. I am making them and not making them…They discuss, fight, laugh, yell, and weep. I was very young when I first heard the story of the exorcism Jesus performs on a possessed man…‘My name is Legion.’ That is my name, too” (2, p. 228).

Search (in this blog) “name is Legion,” “voices,” and “mirror” to see some related past posts.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_Hustvedt

2. Siri Hustvedt. A Plea for Eros: Essays. New York, Picador, 2006.