“Less” by Andrew Sean Greer (post 2): Novelist Arthur Less speaks more truth-in-jest about his alternate personalities and the fiction writing process

“[In] numerous…interviews…Less…keeps to a… persona at all times, refusing to wax philosophical about subjects he chose to write about precisely because he does not understand them” (1, p. 92).

It is often the “host personality” (search) who does interviews. Since the host personality did not do the writing, he cannot give an authoritative interpretation.

“This is the class he will be teaching…He called the course Read Like a Vampire, Write Like a Frankenstein, based on his own notion that writers read other works in order to take their best parts” (1, pp. 102-103).

Other writers have said similar things in their nonfiction writing.

“In the club, as he later recalls, a woman gets onto the dance floor and really lets go…really takes over the floor…Actually, it isn’t a woman; it’s Arthur Less” (1, p. 124).

He is not saying that he pretended to be a woman or that he was expressing effeminacy, but that, in some sense, he was a woman on that occasion. And gay men, per se, do not see themselves as women. So this episode illustrates cross-gender alternate personalities, which are common in multiple personality. He can remember it, because many alternate personalities are aware of each other (but others are not, causing memory gaps).

1. Andrew Sean Greer. Less [2017]. New York, Back Bay Books, 2018.