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.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Saturday, February 3, 2018


Autofiction: New York Times Book Review of fictionalized memoir says it uses novelistic technique, but novelists use multiple personality, not technique.

Autofiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofiction

“Autofiction has long picked away at the boundary between fiction and nonfiction…The term covers a multitude of approaches; here Malmquist sets his novel in opposition to the very meaning of ‘memoir,’ which implies a recollection of something past. In Every Moment We Are Still Alive is narrated in a vivid present tense that collapses the distance between the time of narration and the harrowing events of the story” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/books/review/in-every-moment-we-are-still-alive-tom-malmquist.html

Is Malmquist’s present-tense narration a technique? Did his one and only personality decide to imagine and remember how past events in his life were experienced at the time, and present them from that point of view?

Or, as I would guess, does he have an alternate personality, who originated to help deal with those traumatic events, does not age, continues to live in that past, and has provided the present-tense narration?
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