Jeanette Winterson (post 3): Does her memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” describe her as having multiple personality since childhood?

Having in a previous post quoted Winterson’s 2016 article, in which she said, “Writing is an act of splitting…Writers are multiple personalities,” I bought her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? (2011), and have just read it.

Winterson is adopted as an infant by a disturbed woman and her husband. She leaves home at age 16. She attends Oxford. She becomes a successful novelist. And she eventually meets her birth mother.

Her memoir does not use the term “multiple personality,” but she does describe a time that she goes “mad” (1, p. 161):

“I started waking up at night and finding myself on all fours shouting ‘Mummy, Mummy’ [Mommy]…often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language” (1, pp. 162-163). [This is the emergence of a very young, child-aged alternate personality.]

“I had a sense of myself as a haunted house” (1, p. 165) [a good metaphor for multiple personality].

“…my sense of myself as being a girl who’s a boy who’s a boy who’s a girl. A doubleness at the heart of things” (1, p. 168). [Her adoptive mother dressed her as a boy when she was very young, and she probably has both male and female alternate personalities, which is common.]

“I often hear voices…But in the past, voices were respectable — desired. The visionary and the prophet, the shaman and the wisewoman. And the poet, obviously. Hearing voices can be a good thing” (1, p. 170). [People with multiple personality may hear the voices of their alternate personalities, just as writers may hear the voices of their characters.]

“There was a person in me — a piece of me — however you want to describe it —so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace [Winterson had attempted suicide]…My violent rages…The furious child living alone in the bottom bog wasn’t the creative Jeanette — she was the war casualty. She was the sacrifice. She hated me. She hated life…It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food…I am talking like this because what became clear to me in my madness was that I had to start talking — to the creature…a voice outside my head — not in it — said, ‘Get up and start to work’…Every day I went to work, without a plan, without a plot, to see what I had to say…It is not a surprise that it was a children’s book. The demented creature in me was a lost child. She was willing to be told a story. The grown-up in me had to tell it to her” (1, pp. 171-173).

“Why didn’t I take myself and the creature to therapy? I did, but it didn’t work…she wouldn’t come with me…She was a toddler, except that she was older ages too…She was sometimes a baby. Sometimes she was seven, sometimes eleven, sometimes fifteen” (1, p. 175). [There were several different alternate personalities, but none of them wanted to come out during therapy, because they felt it was Jeanette’s therapy, not their’s; and the therapist never suspected, or knew how to diagnose, multiple personality; which is why many people think it is rare.]

Multiple Personality Since Childhood

“…I left the infant school in disgrace for burning down the play kitchen…I beat up the other kids, boys and girls alike…my mother believed I was demon possessed…” (1, p. 55). [True, her mother is predisposed to satanic interpretations, but Winterson, herself, repeatedly mentions, in passing, that she is a “thug” and capable of committing “murder,” which is so out-of-character for how she generally behaves that it implies the existence of a violent alternate personality.]

“He put his tongue in my mouth…Blackout. I woke up in my own bed…On the inside I would build another self — one that they couldn’t see. Just like [she had done] after the burning of the books” [by her mother] (1, pp. 81-82). [In response to a sexual assault, she has a blackout, which means a memory gap for the time that an alternate personality took the abuse for her. And then she expresses some awareness that she has a way of creating alternate personalities, of which her abusers are not aware.]

So in Winterson’s 2016 article, when she said that writers (which includes herself) have “multiple personalities,” was she expressing insight that what she had described in her memoir was multiple personality since childhood? Or does she dismiss the episode near the end of her memoir as a passing, nonspecific “madness,” and feel she was speaking only metaphorically about writers’ having “splitting and multiple personalities”?

Two Kinds of Writing

“It took me a long time to realize that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look” (1, p. 54). [The writing that writes you is writing controlled by alternate personalities.]

1. Jeanette Winterson. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? New York, Grove Press, 2011.