Many a true word is spoken in jest: T. C. Boyle says writers “suffer from multiple personality disorder. We sit in a room five hours a day talking to ourselves.”

The New Yorker “magazine’s fiction editor…asked George Saunders, T.C. Boyle and Joyce Carol Oates to discuss why so much of modern fiction is negative, even nihilistic…

“Let’s not forget,” Boyle said, “that the three of us suffer from multiple personality disorder. We sit in a room five hours a day talking to ourselves. This is the result” (1).

Coincidental to my recent posts on Frank Conway, Boyle received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, but before Conway was director.

Boyle’s joke (if he meant it as a joke) is not a joke, because writers often experience their characters and narrators—whose voices they may hear—as having minds of their own. This means that the writer has more than one “I,” which is the essence of what multiple personality is. A clinical diagnosis requires overt, observable, personality switches, plus a history of memory gaps (not attributable to another medical condition), but a person’s subjectively having more than one “I” is what is behind it.

Is the novelist’s multiple personality just an artifact of an imaginative writing process? Do writers have multiple personality in their real life or just while they are writing? The recent posts about Frank Conway show that he had personality switches and memory gaps (the other cardinal symptom of multiple personality) in his real life. And if you read about other writers in past posts, you will see that Conway is one more example of a writer with multiple personality, not an exception.

T. C. Boyle may have been joking, but many a true word is spoken in jest.

1. Nathaniel Stein. “The Dark Side of Contemporary Fiction.” The New Yorker,  October 1, 2011. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/new-yorker-festival/the-dark-side-of-contemporary-fiction