Toni Morrison vs. Chloe Wofford: Who was the writer? Did the wrong personality get credit for the novels and win the Nobel Prize?

In a recent post, I made the mistake of saying that a writer’s pseudonym is probably the writing personality. That may be true in some instances, but for me to make a generalization was presumptuous, because each person with multiple personality is unique.

For example, I was just looking at a video of an old interview in which the Chloe Wofford personality said that she did the writing and that the Toni Morrison personality had other responsibilities.

In any case, for this great novelist, the subjective distinction between Chloe Wofford and Toni Morrison was not a joke. It was a problem that plagued her at least since the publication of her first novel, through her winning the Nobel Prize, and for the rest of her life, during which the wrong one (from the point of view of the Chloe Wofford personality) got credit.

Of course, multiple personality is not a psychosis. She knew, objectively, that she was one person, and that the subjective distinction between Chloe and Toni was not real. But to her, subjectively, to borrow a phrase she used to describe her experience of the writing process, the distinction between Toni and Chloe may have sometimes seemed “more real than real.”