“All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost” by Lan Samantha Chang (post 2): Multiple Personality Trait at prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop

Voices Conversing

The protagonist “had never known his father, and his mother had left the two of them when he was three” (1, p. 29), but he does not relate this to the two voices that he hears conversing with each other in his head (see previous post). Are they the voices of two alternate personalities that filled the void of his two missing parents?

In the rest of this two-hundred page novel, the only thing the protagonist adds to what was previously quoted about the conversing voices, is this: “Who the man and woman were, he could not guess. They had simply spoken, and he had not censored their words, passionate or estranged. He had worked long hours at these poems, worked harder than he had ever had, and although in truth he did not know exactly what he had written, he found the poems powerful and mysterious in a way that puzzled him and drew him to his desk as nothing had before” (1, p. 38).

Thus, as previously discussed, the protagonist is aware of his symptom of multiple personality—he hears two voices conversing with each other—and they are integral to his creative writing process, but the character and author do not speak of it in terms of multiple personality. It is one more example of a novel with unlabeled symptoms of multiple personality.

Iowa Writers’ Workshop

Professor Chang (2006-current) is the second Director of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2) discussed here in regard to symptoms of multiple personality. The first was Frank Conroy (1987-2005), about whose own multiple personality trait there is much more information. Please search “Frank Conroy” for that series of posts.

I would guess that other fiction-writing programs have similar traditions of unacknowledged multiple personality.

1. Lan Samantha Chang. All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost [2010]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2011.

2. Wikipedia. “Iowa Writers’ Workshop.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Writers'_Workshop