“The Liars’ Club” (A Memoir) (Chapter 1) by Mary Karr (post 5): Both vivid memory and memory gaps, a common combination in multiple personality 

Memory in Multiple Personality

It is common for persons with multiple personality to have excellent, vivid powers of memory, but also peculiar lapses in memory: amnesia, memory gaps, absent-mindedness, dissociative fugue.

Vivid Memory

“My father comes into focus for me on a Liars’ Club afternoon [when he and his friends would tell each other tall tales]. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can’t but write it in the present tense” (1, p. 15).

Memory Gaps

“When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out…Neighborhood myth has it that I once coldcocked a five-year-old playmate with an army trench shovel, then calmly went back to digging. Some of this explosiveness just came from a naturally bad temperament, of course. But some stems from that night, when my mind simply erased everything up until Dr. Boudreaux began inviting me to show him marks that I now know weren’t even there” (1, p. 9-10).

In Chapter 1, she highlights childhood sexual abuse and memory gaps, but does not mention any specific condition (e.g., multiple personality) for which these might be cause and symptom.

Her Mother

“Pressing Mother for details of her past always led to eye-rolling and aspirin-taking…” (1, p. 12).

The eye-roll (rolling the eyes up) is traditionally related to trance and hypnotizability. Persons who develop multiple personality are often high in hypnotizability. An old theory of multiple personality is that it involves self-hypnosis.

The most common physical symptom of persons with multiple personality is headache (prompting a person to take aspirin), which may occur when alternate personalities fight each other for control.

So the mother’s eye-rolling and aspirin-taking might mean that asking her for details of her past precipitated a conflict for control among alternate personalities.

1. Mary Karr. The Liars’ Club (A Memoir). New York, Viking, 1995.