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, August 18, 2018


New York Times on “The Family Tabor” by Cherise Wolas (post 6) does not suspect multiple personality as cause of protagonist’s 30-year memory gap

The review says: “For 30 years, he has blocked from his memory the fact that he made his fortune on Wall Street by committing insider trading and fraud, and managed to send his friend, the innocent Max Stern, to prison in his stead…Harry has forgotten for 30 years how he made his fortune…More intriguing is the back-and-forth Harry has with himself over the morality of what he has done” (1).

Ordinarily, in reading such a review, I would not take it literally. I would assume it meant that although the character did remember his crime all those years, he had simply not liked to think about it.

However, I have read Cherise Wolas’s previous novel, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, and wrote five posts on it in May 2018 (either scroll down or search “Wolas”). And that novel was about a woman with a split personality.

So, not having read Wolas’s new novel, I don’t know whether the protagonist literally had the kind of  memory gap that could not be accounted for by ordinary forgetting, and which might imply multiple personality. And I don’t know whether “the back-and-forth Harry has with himself” is between his two personalities. But I wonder.

1. Alex Kuczynski. “It’s All Relative,” in New York Times Book Review, Sunday, August 19, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/books/review/family-tabor-cherise-wolas-long-island-story-rick-gekoski.html
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