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.

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Sunday, October 22, 2017

Married to a Novelist: Spouses of fiction writers might corroborate the thesis that most novelists have a normal version of multiple personality.

I don’t know if any spouse of a novelist has paid attention to whether the novelist has multiple personality—defined as more than one personality plus memory gaps—and if they did find that the novelist has multiple personality, has written about it.

The only thing I have in a past post that inadvertently addresses this is quotations from the memoir of actress Claire Bloom about her former spouse, novelist Philip Roth, in which she describes occasional changes in his behavior, and his claim of having had amnesia (a memory gap). Of course, you might discount what people say about each other when they are divorced, but the things she says do not sound like typical vindictiveness.

Do you know of any other relevant memoirs of spouses of novelists? Or, if you, yourself, are a spouse of a novelist, any comments?

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