“Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens (post 2): Amanda Hamilton, Kya’s favorite poet, is one of her alternate personalities.

After Kya learns that Chase Andrews has betrayed her and is engaged to marry someone else (1, p. 208), Kya, who is the kind of person who reads biology textbooks for pleasure, begins to occasionally quote the poems of Amanda Hamilton. Kya’s quoting poetry is out-of-character.

In her first and “favorite Amanda Hamilton poem,” the poet says that someone—“you know…loneliness” [no doubt, Kya]—may “share my senses” (1, p. 214). Thus, they both use the same body (they share the same senses), but Amanda Hamilton is not speaking for Kya, but to Kya.

They are alternate personalities. And when Kya later recites more of Amanda Hamilton’s poems, either the Hamilton personality has put her poems into Kya’s consciousness, or it is actually the Hamilton personality who is speaking, incognito (very common for alternate personalities).

But, you might argue, the narrator states that the poems were found hidden in Kya’s home after her death, labeled with the initials “A.H.”, were in Kya’s own handwriting, and that “Amanda Hamilton was Kya. Kya was the poet” (1, p. 366). Well, the handwritings of alternate personalities are not always different from the host personality. And alternate personalities are part of the same person.

It is not labeled as multiple personality, because the author probably does not think of it in those terms.

The thing is, either the narrator is credible or not. If the reader is going to believe the narrator about finding the poems and necklace at the end (1, pp. 366-367), then the reader can’t suddenly disbelieve everything the narrator previously provided about Kya’s regular personality.

And here is how the narrator quotes regular Kya near the end of the novel (after she has been acquitted): “That’s what nobody understands about me. I never hated people. They hated me. They left me. They harassed me. They attacked me” (1, p. 350). That’s the way the Kya personality genuinely feels.

But someone inside her did hate people for all those reasons. Amanda Hamilton was the spokesperson for that hate. And there was probably another, protector personality, who struck back and took revenge.

Why did the truth come out only after Kya had died? Because if Kya had been alive, she would have had to explain it all, and it is hard to explain without considering multiple personality.

1. Delia Owens. Where the Crawdads Sing. New York, Putnam Penguin, 2018.