“Y is for Yesterday” by Sue Grafton (post 7): Why did Kinsey Millhone have memory gaps and hear voices “chatter,” “babbling” in her head?

“My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a female private investigator, aged thirty-nine, living and working in this Southern California town ninety-five miles north of Los Angeles. I’m also single and cranky-minded to hear some people tell it” (1, p. 13).

Kinsey is neither mentally ill nor alcoholic nor abusing substances. She is both well organized and intuitive.

Therefore, the following seem out of character and require explanation:

“I closed my eyes, hoping to quiet the chatter in my head. It’s difficult to tune into that sixth sense with all that babbling that goes on” (1, p. 239).

“What seemed odd to me later was that I couldn’t reconstruct the sequence of events and conversations with any continuity. I remembered most of it, but there were gaps…” (1, p. 271).

Why did Kinsey hear voices conversing in her head and have memory gaps? And what are these things doing in this novel?

Psychiatrists once thought that hearing voices conversing in your head was a so-called “first rank” symptom, highly diagnostic of the psychosis, schizophrenia. But it is now recognized that voices conversing are usually the voices of alternate personalities, and are usually a symptom of the nonpsychotic condition, multiple personality.

Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, caused by the amnesia that one personality has for the period of time that another personality had taken over.

But since Kinsey is not portrayed as having multiple personality, and since the plot has nothing to do with multiple personality, how did conversing voices and memory gaps get into this novel?

As discussed in past posts, the author had multiple personality, which she once started to discuss in a television interview, but the interviewer wasn’t interested.

1. Sue Grafton. Y is for Yesterday. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017.