Donna Tartt (post 2): Novelist Describes Her “Southern Gothic Childhood” of Tonsils, Codeine, Sleepwalking, Imaginary Playmates, and Fun with Self-Hypnosis.

In the same year that Donna Tartt published her first novel, The Secret History, she published a magazine article about her own childhood (1).

“I started to become what they called ‘sickly’ when I was about five years old. The problem was bad tonsils, nothing serious. But until they were removed, when I was seven, I was ill and feverish much of the time and had to stay in bed an average of about three days a week…

“What my great-grandfather did prescribe for me—along with whatever medicine I got from the doctor…[was] glasses of whiskey at my bedtime and regular massive doses of…codeine cough syrup. The whiskey was mixed with sugar and hot water; it was supposed to make me sleep and help me put on weight, both of which it did…and—between the fever and the whiskey and the codeine—I spent nearly two years of my childhood submerged in a pretty powerfully altered state of consciousness…

“My report card for the first grade stated that I was ‘quiet’ and ‘cooperative.’ But what I really preferred was staying home sick, where I could allow my hallucinations to run free without the teacher’s tedious interruptions. I would stare, sometimes for hours, at a particular View-Master reel: Peter Pan, soaring high over London…Even when unmedicated, if I stared at this particular picture long enough, I sometimes got the giddy sensation that I was flying; just as, if I closed my eyes in the backseat of my mother’s Chrysler and tried hard enough, I could sometimes transform the Chrysler into an airplane…

“My mother…too, had been a dreamy little girl who sleepwalked and had imaginary playmates.

“We also shared the gift…of being able to plunge ourselves into sort of eerie, self-induced fits. I would stare fixedly at a certain object [a classic method to induce hypnosis] and repeat a word or phrase until it became nonsense. Then, at some subsequent point…I would have absolutely no idea who or where I was, and be unable to recognize even members of my own family…I stumbled upon this gift quite by accident when I was four or five, while sitting in an Italian restaurant in Memphis with my parents…the last time I was ever able to successfully pull this trick was when I was a sophomore in high school…” (1).

Writing and Self-Hypnosis

Some of Tartt’s hallucinations and altered states of consciousness may have been due to fever and drugs. But everything that she voluntarily induced by intense staring was probably an adventure in self-hypnosis. And since she does not call it self-hypnosis, she may not have realized that that was the talent she was developing and practicing during her childhood.

As discussed in past posts, some writers have explicitly said that the process of writing fiction includes self-hypnosis. And of course, after they have practiced that talent, they may become able to enter the hypnotic trance more or less at will, without having to use any induction techniques such as staring. All they need to do to enter the trance is whatever little ritual they have developed to get into their writing frame of mind.

Dissociative, Altered States of Consciousness

Multiple personality is a condition of dissociative, altered states of consciousness. Tartt mentions having sleepwalking, imaginary playmates, altered states of consciousness, and self-induced states of mind in which she did not recognize her family members, all of which could very well have been symptoms of multiple personality, but since she does not elaborate sufficiently on what these experiences entailed, the history is not definitive.

Her enjoyable, self-induced states, one aspect of which was that she temporarily did not recognize family members, are interesting, because people with multiple personality may have certain alternate personalities who do not know people with whom the regular personality is quite familiar. Indeed, when evaluating a person suspected of having multiple personality, it is sometimes useful to ask family members if the person sometimes does not seem to know them. However, Tartt does not give sufficient details for me to be sure about the nature of these episodes.

All I can say is that Tartt’s childhood involved two traumatic years (ages five to seven) involving dissociative, altered states of consciousness, and other years which included episodes of dissociative, altered states of consciousness, some intentionally self-induced and some not.

1. Donna Tartt. “Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine.” Harper’s Magazine, July 1992, pp. 60-66. http://www.languageisavirus.com/donna_tartt/non-fiction-sleepytown.php#.WXwn2lqGM4V