BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Sunday, September 11, 2016

Frank Conroy’s Foreword to “Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl” cites it as one of two books that he found most inspirational to him as a writer.

Foreword

“When I began…to write my own memoirs, there were two books whose existence heartened me—Mary McCarthy’s Memoirs…and Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, because it proved that a writer could successfully re-create states of consciousness despite his failure to understand those states when they had originally occurred…

“Renee’s courage inspired me…My own fears of reliving what had been a chaotic, frightening and confusing childhood seemed, after her example, fears I could not allow myself…

“…the book moved me because it was so clearly a triumph…of faith in the act of writing. Beset by…the impossibility of any full and direct re-creation of abnormal states of mind…she nonetheless went on to write the book, giving us the sensations of schizophrenia more vividly…than anything I’ve read…”

Frank Conroy

“Frank Conroy (1936 – 2005)…published five books, including the highly acclaimed memoir Stop-Time. Published in 1967, this…book was nominated for the National Book Award…Conroy…was director of the influential Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa for 18 years, from 1987 until 2005…” (Wikipedia).

He was an eminent person in the American literary academy.

In my first post of this blog, on Charles Dickens, in discussing Edmund Wilson’s famous essay on Dickens’s multiple personality, “Two Scrooges,” I wondered why Wilson had appreciated Dickens’s multiple personality while others had not. Had Wilson known anyone with multiple personality? I found that he had. A biography of Wilson’s wife, the novelist and critic, Mary McCarthy, told of her multiple personality since childhood.

Thus, both books cited by the longtime director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop as most inspirational to him as a writer were by people who had multiple personality: one, with misdiagnosed mental illness, was the “schizophrenic girl”; the other, with the normal version, was a novelist.
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