“Fiction’s Fake New Drugs” by Jonathan Lethem (post 7): He does not say so, but fiction writers’ imaginary drugs mimic aspects of multiple personality

Symptoms of multiple personality include switching to be like a different person; doing things you don’t remember doing; segregating memories of trauma in alternate personalities and behind walls of amnesia so they won’t trouble the regular personality. Do fiction’s fake new drugs mimic aspects of multiple personality, because fiction writers have experienced it?

“Sense-derangementwise, it was unlike acid in that it was not a question of the ‘Essential-I’ having new insights, but of becoming a different person entirely” (1).

“Cut to the next morning: ‘I wrote someone an email in my sleep!’ Now Ray looked at Christa. ‘Did you give her one of my Vernixes? You gave her one of my Vernixes, didn’t you!’ … I was just standing there agape. ‘You gave me some pills that make you email in your sleep?’” (1)

“to encourage them to ‘enfold’ their trauma by tucking it into cognitive corners where it won’t trouble them anymore” (1).

“Perhaps the most committed of the new drug novels, Ottessa Moshfegh’s ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation' raises the stakes beyond mere amnesiac nocturnal emailing or the deletion of a few wartime traumas: Infermiterol, prescribed as a sleep aid — by surely one of the very worst psychiatrists in the history of fiction — turns out to offer possibilities for living one’s entire life behind a veil of forgetting (something Moshfegh’s book reminded me I’d once toyed with myself, in a substance called Forgettol from my first novel, 'Gun, With Occasional Music’; I’d nearly forgotten it)” (1).

1. Jonathan Lethem. “Fiction’s Fake New Drugs.” New York Times, Dec. 24, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/books/review/fiction-fake-drugs.html