Elena Ferrante and Jeanette Winterson on Their Multiple Personality and Fiction Writing

November 2, 2016

Elena Ferrante (post 7) says she writes under dictation, reveals self even she may not know, and usually has narrative “I” with alternating, contrasting souls.

“I can’t say precisely…how a story takes shape. When it’s done you try to explain how it happened, but every effort, at least in my case, is insufficient. There is a before, made up of fragments of memory…frantumaglia—bits and pieces of uncertain origin which rattle around in your head, not always comfortably…But how I moved from the frantumaglia…into a story that seemed convincing—that escapes me, I can’t give an honest account…

“I only know one thing for certain—it seems to me that I work well when I can start from a flat, dry tone, that of a strong, lucid, educated woman…Only when the story begins to emerge safely, thanks to that tone, do I begin to wait for the moment when I’ll be able to replace those well-oiled, quiet links with something rustier, raspier, and with a pace that’s disjointed and agitated, even at the growing risk of the story falling apart. The moment I change register for the first time is both exciting and anguished…I enjoy…revealing another, rougher soul underneath, someone raucous, maybe even crude. I work hard to make that change in register come as a surprise and also to make it seem natural when we go back to a more serene style of narration…I always worry that the narrating ‘I’ won’t be able to calm back down…

“It has become natural to think of the author as a particular individual who exists, inevitably, outside the text…Remove that individual from the public eye and…we discover that the text…has taken possession of the person who writes. If we want to find that person, she’s right there, revealing a self that even she may not truly know…

“While I’m writing I think I know a lot about my characters, but then I discover I know much less than my readers. The extraordinary thing about the written word is that by nature it can do without your presence and also, in many respects, without your intentions…Writing…doesn’t need you…

“The state of grace…happens when…you continue to write as if under dictation…For all sixteen hundred pages of the Neapolitan Novels, I never felt the need to restructure events, characters, feelings, turning points, reversals…I am amazed myself…I never resorted to notes, chronologies, plans of any sort…” (1).

1. Sandro and Sandra Ferri (Ferrante’s publishers, who interviewed her in person). “Elena Ferrante, Art of Fiction No. 228.” The Paris Review, Spring 2015 No. 212.

November 6, 2016

“Frantumaglia” by Elena Ferrante (post 8): Title refers to her fragments—alternate personalities—which she has, and uses to write, like Dostoevsky.

“My mother left me a word in her dialect that she used to describe how she felt when she was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart. She said that inside her she had a frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments” (1, p. 99).

Interviewer: In the Neapolitan novels, can Elena and Lila be interpreted as a single character? As two sides of a single person? Does every writer consist of two halves?

Ferrante: “If we were made of only two halves, individual life would be simple, but the “I” is a crowd, with a large quantity of heterogeneous fragments tossing about inside. And the female “I”, in particular, with its long history of oppression and repression, tends to shatter as it’s tossed around, and to reappear and shatter again, always in an unpredictable way. Stories feed on the fragments, which are concealed under an appearance of unity and constitute a sort of chaos to depart from, an obscurity to illuminate. Stories, characters come from there. Reading Dostoyevsky when I was young, I thought that all the characters, the pure and the abominable, were actually his secret voices, hidden, cunningly wrought fragments. Everything was poured, unfiltered, and with extreme audacity, into his works” (1, p. 322).

1. Elena Ferrante. Frantumaglia. New York, Europa editions, 2016.

June 19, 2017

Jeanette Winterson defends Elena Ferrante’s right to be two distinct personalities, because “Writing is an act of splitting…Writers are multiple personalities”

“And I go on calling Elena Ferrante Elena Ferrante because that is who she wishes to be. She has been very clear about why she has chosen to be two people – one of whom can be known through her books, and one of whom cannot be known at all. Writing is an act of splitting – like mercury. Writers are multiple personalities” (1).

1. Jeanette Winterson. “The malice and sexism behind the ‘unmasking’ of Elena Ferrante.” The Guardian, October 7, 2016.

August 14, 2017

Jeanette Winterson (post 3): Does her memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” describe her as having multiple personality since childhood?

Having in a previous post quoted Winterson’s 2016 article, in which she said, “Writing is an act of splitting…Writers are multiple personalities,” I bought her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? (2011), and have just read it.

Winterson is adopted as an infant by a disturbed woman and her husband. She leaves home at age 16. She attends Oxford. She becomes a successful novelist. And she eventually meets her birth mother.

Her memoir does not use the term “multiple personality,” but she does describe a time that she goes “mad” (1, p. 161):

“I started waking up at night and finding myself on all fours shouting ‘Mummy, Mummy’ [Mommy]…often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language” (1, pp. 162-163). [This is the emergence of a very young, child-aged alternate personality.]

“I had a sense of myself as a haunted house” (1, p. 165) [a good metaphor for multiple personality].

“…my sense of myself as being a girl who’s a boy who’s a boy who’s a girl. A doubleness at the heart of things” (1, p. 168). [Her adoptive mother dressed her as a boy when she was very young, and she probably has both male and female alternate personalities, which is common.]

“I often hear voices…But in the past, voices were respectable — desired. The visionary and the prophet, the shaman and the wisewoman. And the poet, obviously. Hearing voices can be a good thing” (1, p. 170). [People with multiple personality may hear the voices of their alternate personalities, just as writers may hear the voices of their characters.]

“There was a person in me — a piece of me — however you want to describe it —so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace [Winterson had attempted suicide]…My violent rages…The furious child living alone in the bottom bog wasn’t the creative Jeanette — she was the war casualty. She was the sacrifice. She hated me. She hated life…It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food…I am talking like this because what became clear to me in my madness was that I had to start talking — to the creature…a voice outside my head — not in it — said, ‘Get up and start to work’…Every day I went to work, without a plan, without a plot, to see what I had to say…It is not a surprise that it was a children’s book. The demented creature in me was a lost child. She was willing to be told a story. The grown-up in me had to tell it to her” (1, pp. 171-173).

“Why didn’t I take myself and the creature to therapy? I did, but it didn’t work…she wouldn’t come with me…She was a toddler, except that she was older ages too…She was sometimes a baby. Sometimes she was seven, sometimes eleven, sometimes fifteen” (1, p. 175). [There were several different alternate personalities, but none of them wanted to come out during therapy, because they felt it was Jeanette’s therapy, not their’s; and the therapist never suspected, or knew how to diagnose, multiple personality; which is why many people think it is rare.]

Multiple Personality Since Childhood

“…I left the infant school in disgrace for burning down the play kitchen…I beat up the other kids, boys and girls alike…my mother believed I was demon possessed…” (1, p. 55). [True, her mother is predisposed to satanic interpretations, but Winterson, herself, repeatedly mentions, in passing, that she is a “thug” and capable of committing “murder,” which is so out-of-character for how she generally behaves that it implies the existence of a violent alternate personality.]

“He put his tongue in my mouth…Blackout. I woke up in my own bed…On the inside I would build another self — one that they couldn’t see. Just like [she had done] after the burning of the books” [by her mother] (1, pp. 81-82). [In response to a sexual assault, she has a blackout, which means a memory gap for the time that an alternate personality took the abuse for her. And then she expresses some awareness that she has a way of creating alternate personalities, of which her abusers are not aware.]

So in Winterson’s 2016 article, when she said that writers (which includes herself) have “multiple personalities,” was she expressing insight that what she had described in her memoir was multiple personality since childhood? Or does she dismiss the episode near the end of her memoir as a passing, nonspecific “madness,” and feel she was speaking only metaphorically about writers’ having “splitting and multiple personalities”?

Two Kinds of Writing

“It took me a long time to realize that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look” (1, p. 54). [The writing that writes you is writing controlled by alternate personalities.]

1. Jeanette Winterson. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? New York, Grove Press, 2011.

August 16, 2017

Jeanette Winterson (post 5): In award-winning first novel, “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit,” first-person narrator, Jeanette, speaks with an alternate personality.

According to the author’s memoir (see previous post), her mother and religious community did literally attempt to exorcise demons which they alleged had caused her lesbian relationships. But the memoir did not include Jeanette’s conversation with her demon. The novel does.

Jeanette thinks of this experience in terms of demon possession or nonspecific madness (and not in terms of multiple personality, the psychiatric perspective):

“Everyone has a demon like cats have fleas…

“ ‘If I let them take away my demons [thinks Jeanette, about her pending exorcism], I’ll have to give up what I’ve found’ [love with a woman].

“ ‘You can’t do that,’ said a voice at my elbow.

“ Leaning on the coffee table was the orange demon.

“ ‘I’ve gone mad,’ I thought.

“ ‘That may well be so,’ agreed the demon evenly. ‘So make the most of it.’

“ ‘What do you want?’ [Jeanette asks].

“ ‘I want to help you decide what you want…Everyone has a demon as you so rightly observed,’ the thing began, ‘but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it’…

“ ‘But in the Bible you keep getting driven out,’ [says Jeanette].

“ ‘Don’t believe all you read’ [the demon replies]” (1, pp. 108-109).

Jeanette says that everyone has a demon. The demon agrees, adding that many don’t realize it or know how to use it.

Jeanette and her demon are right in regard to novelists, most of whom have multiple personality. And even if novelists don’t know they have it, or don’t think of it in those terms, they know how to make use of it in their writing process.

1. Jeanette Winterson. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. New York, Grove Press, 1985.