Dani Shapiro, memoirist and novelist, quoted on her reading habits, Inner Censor, and dissociative fugues

I just read Dani Shapiro’s “By the Book” interview for The New York Times Book Review, which is a regular feature about the reading habits of well-known people. She says:

“I love writers who take risks, break rules, don’t succumb to the censoring voice whispering it can’t be done…[She reads to] enter the consciousness, the inner life, of another human being…I’m drawn to fractured narratives and linked stories, like…Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad”…These days I read several books simultaneously…” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/books/review/dani-shapiro-by-the-book.html

When she speaks of a “censoring voice whispering,” is this just a metaphor or is she referring to what she experiences as a person-like being inside her? Here is an excerpt from her memoir, “Still Writing” (2013):

“Under the guise of being helpful, or honest, my censor is like a guided missile aiming at every nook and cranny where I am at my weakest and most vulnerable. She will stoop and connive. All she wants to do is stop me from entering that sacred place from which the work springs. She is at her most insidious when I am at the beginning, because she knows that once I have begun, she will lose her power over me…The I.C. [Inner Censor], once you’re on a nickname basis, should be treated like an annoying, potentially undermining colleague” http://jenny-blake-me.squarespace.com/blog/still-writing

She says that another recurrent problem is dissociative fugues:

“It’s always just me versus me…When I find myself, as if waking from a fugue state, on Facebook or Twitter before I’ve begun my writing day, I know that I’m losing the battle” http://www.centerforfiction.org/forwriters/writers-on-writing/dani-shapiro-on-procrastination

“If, at one moment, you are sitting quietly at your desk, and then—fugue state alert!—you are suddenly on your knees planting tulips, or perusing your favorite online shopping Web site, and you don’t know how you got there…” http://jenny-blake-me.squarespace.com/blog/still-writing

Search “dissociative fugue” for past discussions.