“Where the Past Begins (A Writer’s Memoir)” by Amy Tan (post 3): Author’s Host Personality, Narrator Personality, and Two Child-Aged Personalities

“And then there are the experiences that were a secret to myself…One was shocking: my mother on the verge of killing me. How could I have forgotten that?…The bad stuff gave me the emotional reactions I have today—my quirks of personality, my volatility and secretiveness…

“The fictional mind can take me to what it knows…This is the fictional mind that lets go and allows free-form imagination to take over…It requires that I let go of logic, assumptions, rationale, and conscious memory. I am guided by intuitions, and as I put together the story, the origins of those intuitions return, and not just as a distant memory of what happened, but as if I am going through the moments and the heart-pounding suspense as it happens…

“My mother is holding a Chinese cleaver, the one she uses to slice raw beef. She’s coming at me and I’m backing away…“I kill you first…then me. We…go to heaven together”…She can’t take it anymore and I can’t either. I’m shouting, “Go ahead. Do it. Do it right now.”…And then I hear a disembodied voice come out of me—not my voice—and it’s wailing, “I want to live! I want to live!” And I’m so goddamned mad that this voice betrayed me…

“I recalled my feeling that the disembodied voice had a will of its own and went against mine…

“And then I considered that maybe the episode had never happened. If it had, I wouldn’t have forgotten it—not for twenty years…I eventually called my mother…She immediately confirmed [that it did happen]”…

“I know that there must be many traumatic episodes in my life that my subconscious has put away…But once the fiction-writing mind is freed, there are no censors, no prohibitions…But its most important trait is this: it seeks a story, a narrative that reveals what happened and why it happened” (pp. 110-130).

Four Personalities

1. Host Personality: In multiple personality, the regular personality is typically the least in the know and has the most amnesia.

2. Narrator Personality: The “fictional mind” can access other personalities and their stories.

3. Suicidal Child-Aged Personality: She wants to end her mother’s never-ending death threats and get it over with.

4. Another Child-Aged Personality: She wants to live, says so in her own voice, and has a will of her own.

This analysis into just four personalities is probably an oversimplification.

Amy Tan. Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2017.