Can you tell a book by its cover? When the cover of a novel has a fragmented portrayal of a person, does the publisher imply multiple personality?

In yesterday’s post, I speculated about a novel that I have not read, based on the the front cover, the title, and the book review in the New York Times. I thought it would be bizarre to have a front cover like that if it were not meant to convey that the protagonist has multiple personality. But it is possible that all the publisher meant to convey is that the protagonist has conflicts.

Indeed, what is the difference between the view that the character is conflicted between her wishes to be a mother and her wishes to be a writer vs. the view that she has multiple personality, with a family personality and a writer personality, who are in conflict? There are subjective and objective differences between these two scenarios.

Subjective

If the character had multiple personality, she would feel that her family self and her writer self were like two different people. For example, the writer self would feel that she is a person in her own right, that she is the real person, that writing is what she values, and that she can’t identify with the wish to have children and devote herself to family life. She feels her mind is made to create stories and fictional worlds. This is how she is, how she feels, and she is not ambivalent about the type of person she is and what she wants.

In contrast, a character who did not have multiple personality would feel ambivalent. On the one hand, she has enjoyed writing and found it fulfilling, but she also gets joy and fulfillment from family life. Each way of life has pluses and minuses. She can identify with both. So she is conflicted.

Objective

Multiple personality usually has memory gaps to one extent or another, because one personality may have amnesia for the periods of time that another personality was in control. For any particular pair of personalities, they may both be unaware of each other, or one may be aware of the other, but not vice versa.

For example, the family personality may know that she has published things in the past (books with her name on it are in her home on a bookshelf), but may have amnesia for the fiction-writing experience itself, so she does not really identify with it. Meanwhile, the writing personality may be conscious of the family life and the family personality’s activities, but can’t see why a person would want to do that and can’t identify with it.

If the above were the scenario, then other characters, such as the woman’s literary agent or editor, might find that the woman (family personality) does not seem to remember things related to the writing, that she should remember.

Aside from these memory issues in multiple personality, the narrator or other characters might note thinking and behavioral differences. The woman may be noted to have different kinds of thoughts, and to dress and behave differently, depending on which personality was in control.