Gillian Flynn’s first novel “Sharp Objects” is HBO mini-series: Both “Sharp Objects” and “Gone Girl” have protagonists with multiple personality

Actress Amy Adams will play Camille in the HBO mini-series based on Gillian Flynn’s first novel, “Sharp Objects”: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/arts/television/amy-adams-hollywood-sharp-objects.html

October 29, 2016

Gillian Flynn retrospective: In “Gone Girl” and “Sharp Objects” (Flynn’s first novel) the protagonist has gratuitous or unacknowledged multiple personality.

As you will see in the following two past posts, Gone Girl has “gratuitous multiple personality,” which means that a character has multiple personality, but it is not recognized as such by any character or narrator, and it plays no intentional part in the plot or character development. Sharp Objects has “unacknowledged multiple personality,” which means that the character’s multiple personality is integral to character development, but no character or narrator recognizes that this character has multiple personality, per se.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl: The Author Doesn’t Know That Her Character Has Multiple Personality

Amy discovers that her husband, Nick, is unfaithful. To take revenge, she leaves home—thus the title, Gone Girl—and stages her disappearance to look like he has killed her and disposed of the body.

So it is astoundingly inconsistent when Amy tells the reader that she is planning to kill herself, and will do so in a way that her body will never be found. Why would she kill herself after successfully taking revenge? And if she is going to kill herself anyway, why not ensure Nick’s conviction for murder by providing her dead body to the police?

If you haven’t read Gone Girl, you might wonder how a story with such amateurish inconsistencies could get published. But if you recall my post on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, you can guess the answer. The novel is otherwise so well written that the reader ignores or makes excuses for the inconsistencies.

Now, when I say that the author doesn’t know that Amy has multiple personality, I must qualify that statement by saying that the author has partial insight, and sometimes seems to be intentionally providing clues to Amy’s multiple personality. For example, Nick recalls that Amy had once taken singing lessons from a Paula, and knew a Jessie from a fashion-design course. “But then I’d ask about Jessie or Paula a month later, and Amy would look at me like I was making up words” (1, p. 46). This implies that Amy’s regular personality had amnesia for what her singing and fashion-design personalities had been doing.

Amy says, “The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities…I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they’re too lazy or stupid to pull off a switch” (1, p. 222).

And Nick is not totally oblivious to Amy’s deep changeability. He says, “She’s like this endless archeological dig: You think you’ve reached the final layer, and then you bring down your pick one more time, and you break through to a whole new mine shaft beneath. With a maze of tunnels and bottomless pits” (1, pp.253-254).

At one point, Amy distinguishes between two personalities, herself and another “I,” who has come into play since she faked her death. She says, speaking about a man named Jeff: “I wonder if ‘I’ might like sleeping with him” (1, p. 282). “I have absolutely no intention of being part of this illicit piscine economy, but ‘I’ am fairly interested. How many women can say they were part of a fish-smuggling ring? ’I’ am game. I have become game again since I died…‘I’ can do pretty much anything. A ghost has that freedom” (1, p. 286). Note: She has become game again, meaning that this other “I” personality, who is game for things that her regular self isn’t, had been present in the past, before she staged her death.

Why, then, do I say that Gillian Flynn has only partial insight to Amy’s multiple personality? After all, she has Amy explicitly say (see above), “I change personalities.” But she then says—like Philip Roth in his Paris Review interview (see past post)—“I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it.”

Well, it may be fair to say that “most people” do this (have multiple personality) if by “people” you are referring to novelists only. As I have previously said, I would guess that 90% of novelists have multiple personality (a normal version of it). But most of the general public don’t (only 30% has the normal version, and 1.5% the mental disorder).

In the last third of the novel, Gillian Flynn does not make a point of Amy’s multiple personality. (Except that Amy abruptly changes her mind and doesn’t kill herself, since, evidently, only one of her personalities was suicidal.) This suggests that the author’s earlier clues and references to multiple personality were just her conception of normal psychology, based on knowing herself, another great novelist. [At the time this post was written, the blog was called, "Great Novelists have Multiple Personality.]

1. Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl. New York, Crown Publishers, 2012.

Friday, July 31, 2015

Gillian Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects: As in Gone Girl and Dark Places, the protagonist has multiple personality, but in this novel it is the title issue

The plot of Sharp Objects is about solving several murders—which turn out to have been committed by the protagonist’s mother and half sister—all of which serves to dramatize the protagonist’s traumatic childhood.

The novel’s main issue is indicated by the title, Sharp Objects, which refers, not to the murders, but to the knives and razor blades used by the protagonist, Camille, to cut and scar her skin since childhood. (As readers of this blog know, multiple personality begins in a traumatic childhood).

Camille has a history of being psychiatrically hospitalized for self-cutting. She has a beautiful face, but scars from self-cutting cover her body from the neck down. She is no longer cutting, but her urge to cut continues throughout the novel.

A few brief quotes from a textbook on multiple personality will help you to understand what I will then quote from the novel.

Self-Cutting in Multiple Personality

“Self-mutilation—typically cutting with glass or razor blades, or burning with cigarettes or matches—occurs in at least a third of MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients. The percentage of self-mutilators is probably much higher, because this behavior is often not reported to therapists and is rarely spontaneously discovered except by physical examination” (1, p. 64).

“The sites of self-mutilation in MPD are often hidden from casual examination and commonly include upper arms (hidden by long sleeves), back, inner thighs, breasts, and buttocks. Self-mutilation frequently takes the form of delicate self-cutting with razor blades or fragments of glass” (1, p. 89).

“…persecutor personalities are found in the majority of MPD patients. The persecutor personalities usually direct their acts of hostility toward the host [regular] personality…Suicide is an ever-present issue with multiples. The internal persecutors may be threatening to commit suicide themselves, threatening to kill the host (internal homicide), or urging or commanding the host to kill himself or herself…Self-mutilation by persecutors to punish the host or other alters is common” (1, pp. 205-206).

In this blog, suicide in multiple personality was seen in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Internal homicide was my interpretation of Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen.” Self-cutting has not been discussed in the blog previously.

Camille’s Skin Speaks

Camille has carved specific words into her skin. The words are not experienced by her as being her own thoughts. They just seem to come to her or appear on her skin or are “screamed” at her, and she feels the urge to take sharp objects and cut these words into her skin.

The fact that these are specific words, not just feelings, suggests that they are communications from some sort of thinker. The compulsion to carve them into her skin might indicate that the thinker wants his or her thoughts to be taken seriously and remembered.

Actually, there seems to be more than one thinker behind these words, since the “words” are sometimes described as “squabbling at each other”:

“I am a cutter…My skin, you see, screams. It’s covered with words—cook, cupcake, kitty, curls—as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh…my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked…The problem started long before that…The last word I ever carved into myself, sixteen years after I started: vanish. Sometimes I can hear the words squabbling at each other across my body…Vanish did it for me. I’d saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in. I stayed at the hospital twelve weeks. It’s a special place for people who cut, almost all of them women, most under twenty-five. I went when I was thirty” (2, pp. 60-63).

Camille is not psychotic. But how can a person who is not psychotic have the subjective experiences and overt behavior described above? The likely explanation is that she gets these messages from, and is pushed to self-cut by, one or more alternate personalities.

However, if she were a real person coming to me for psychiatric evaluation, I would not make the diagnosis of multiple personality unless and until I actually met and interviewed one or more alternate personalities (without using any drugs or hypnosis).

For example, I might look at the words carved into her skin, choose one, and, since Camille says that she didn’t think up that word, I would ask, “Who said [specific word]?” If she had multiple personality, then in reaction to my question I would see a change in demeanor, the alternate personality involved with that specific word would identify herself, and the alter would be able to provide verifiable information previously unknown to my patient.

Does Gillian Flynn understand Camille?

She would if she had mechanically constructed the character, but most novelists don’t get their characters that way. I would guess that she had read of, or knew, someone who was a cutter; that the idea incubated in her mind; and that one day the character came alive for her. So I think it unlikely that Flynn has any deep psychological understanding of the character.

What about my theory that novelists have a normal version of multiple personality and that they use it to write their novels? Well, I do believe that, but that doesn’t mean most novelists know they have multiple personality or that I know what part it played in the writing of any particular novel.

As I have said in previous posts, apart from my analyses of Gone Girl and Dark Places, the only things I know about Gillian Flynn are that her favorite mystery novelist is Agatha Christie (see my posts on Christie), and that, as a child, one of Flynn’s favorite movies was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which the main character has multiple personality.

1. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, Guilford Press, 1989.

2. Gillian Flynn. Sharp Objects. New York, Broadway Paperbacks, 2006.