Why don’t most great fiction writers boast?

        Because, as Charles Dickens said, “I don’t invent it.”

        Because, as Mark Twain said, “Writers don’t create characters.”

Because, as Stephen King said, his stories are “found objects.”

        Because most fiction writers experience their works as 

        coming TO them, not FROM them.

Where do fiction writers come from?

They self-select themselves from the approximately 30% of the population with multiple personality trait.  These people, as Walt Whitman said, “contain multitudes.”

Indeed, most fiction writers can’t analyze their own works because their works are written by multiple narrative personalities.

Multiple Personality: Nonsense? Rare Mental Illness? Fakery? Demon Possession?

Most educated people dismiss multiple personality as nonsense. It doesn’t seem possible for a person to have other people inside them. Actually, multiple personality doesn’t mean having other real persons inside you, but whether the alternate personalities are real or imaginary, the whole idea seems preposterous; although, most educated people do allow for the possibility that a person could have multiple personality as a rare mental illness. They don’t know why, if it exists at all, that it would be rare, but they think it must be.

Since movies show actors faking multiple personality, it is obviously something a person could fake. It is harder to fake than most other mental illnesses, because correctly remembering the ideosyncracies of a dozen or more personalities is not easy, but it is easy to fake in the short run.

Most psychiatric patients do not want to fake or be diagnosed as having multiple personality, because they think it is crazier than other mental illnesses like schizophrenia, because it is only in multiple personality that you don’t even know who you are or remember what you do. 

Traditionally, religious people think of multiple personality as being possessed by spirits or demons, which may make the very idea of multiple personality seem frightening or even satanic.

So it is easy to understand why relatively few people can read this blog with an open mind.

My Belated Interest in Multiple Personality

In 1972, after graduating from college in Boston and from medical school in Richmond, Virginia, I returned to Brooklyn, New York, where I had been born and raised. My father was a family physician, but I wanted to specialize in psychiatry, so I went to a psychiatric residency training program at a hospital in Brooklyn.

The Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry was an eminent Freudian psychoanalyst, but the Director of Psychiatric Residency Training was a psychopharmacologist, because diagnosis and treatment revolved mainly around medication. Neither of these psychiatrists had any interest in multiple personality, which was never diagnosed in any of the patients.

My idea of multiple personality was based on the 1957 movie, “The Three Faces of Eve” and the 1976 movie, “Sybil.” I thought that there must be rare cases like that, but I didn’t expect to ever see any.

As a psychiatrist in the 1970s and 1980s, I occasionally came across a psychiatric journal article about multiple personality, but I never saw a patient who looked like they had it, and didn’t expect that I ever would.

Toward the end of the 1980s, working in a psychiatric outpatient clinic, I found a new patient puzzling, and asked her if she ever had memory gaps, which was the only thing I recalled from the journal articles on multiple personality, and which I had never asked any patient previously. When she said that she did have memory gaps, I was shocked, and the patient evidently was, too, because she reacted like I had stumbled on a sensitive secret that frightened her, and she didn’t return to the clinic.

I continued to ask puzzling patients about memory gaps, and found that the percentage of my patients who had them varied from 0-5%. When I asked the patient what had gone on during the missing period of time, I would often see them switch to an alternate personality, who knew about that time. Then the patient would switch back to the regular personality, with a memory gap for the conversation I just had with the alternate. However, sometimes the alternate was antagonistic toward the regular, host personality and toward me, too, since it considered me the host’s ally.

In short, I discovered that multiple personality was surprisingly common, but was designed to keep itself hidden and avoid diagnosis.

Meanwhile, over the years, I had been reading interviews of fiction writers, since I thought I might one day write a novel. I had always thought the writers were joking when they spoke of communicating with their characters, who seemed to have minds of their own. But now that I had seen multiple personality, I realized they were not joking, although they said it in a joking manner, so they could deny it if anyone took them seriously and thought they were crazy.

Then I looked at fiction writers’ essays, biographies. and works. Some writers had actually acknowledged multiple personality. But mostly I found unlabeled, unintentional symptoms of multiple personality, which reflected how the author’s mind worked.

The difference between the patients and the writers was that the patients were having distress and dysfunction from the multiple personality, but the novelists weren’t. In fact, since alternate personalities are often imaginative and like to make up stories, this was a core asset for fiction writing. So I made the distinction between multiple personality disorder and multiple personality trait (surprisingly common, especially in fiction writers).

The New York Times Book Review continues to make a fool of itself regarding both multiple personality disorder and multiple personality trait

Today’s Sunday print edition of The New York Times Book Review begins a book review by citing the case of Mary Reynolds from the beginning of the nineteenth century as “the first well-documented case of multiple personality disorder” (1).

The Times’ review then ignores that history by saying that multiple personality disorder is a social phenomenon, “spawned” in 1980, based on a 1973 case history and movie.

Of course, as a literary review, the Times’ principal ignorance is not multiple personality disorder, a mental illness, but multiple personality trait, an asset in fiction writing.

1. ”https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/23/books/review/the-sleeping-beauties-suzanne-osullivan.html

“The One You Want To Marry (And Other Identities I’ve Had)” a memoir by Sophie Santos (post 1): Preface

“…I was sitting across from my retired lieutenant colonel dad at a stripmall Mexican restaurant. He had taken me to lunch on my break from rehearsing for one of the spring college plays…

“So, kiddo—you got a boyfriend?”

“No,” I said…

Without missing a beat, he said, “You got a girlfriend?

BOOM. Just like that, my casual, avoid-everything lunch had turned into a high-stakes interrogation…

“Well, kiddo—you always had good female relationships.”

Female friendships.” It was the final nail in the coffin of gaydom. I was in a trance as we walked out of the restaurant, got into his car, and drove back to campus. I have no memory of getting out of the car and walking into the building for rehearsal, but suddenly I was sitting in the lobby of the theater building.

Alone. No one had returned from break yet, and it was just, me, myself…

All of a sudden, I let out a huge laugh.

I had accepted that I was gay. I mean, I was in a relationship, HELLO! But this was different. My dad had called out something that appeared to have been there all along…

What I wanted to know was, how the fuck did I not see the signs? (1, pp. xvii-xix).

Comment

Persons with multiple personality trait are more likely to enter trance states, have memory gaps, and to both know and not know things about themselves.

1. Sophie Santos. The One You Want To Marry (And Other Identities I’ve Had). New York, TOPPLE Books & Little A, 2021.

“Vaccine Refusers Dig In”: Is the voice of an alternate personality the “noise” behind this flaw in human judgment?

Front Page,Today’s New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/health/covid-boosters-unvaccinated.html

I have no evidence that multiple personality trait is involved in vaccine refusal. But the issue reminded me of the following past post:

May 19, 2021

“Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment” by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein: Is Multiple Personality Noisy?

Judging from the book’s index (1) and reviews (2, 3, 4), the authors have not considered multiple personality as one possible cause for seemingly random or idiosyncratic judgment.

1. Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. New York, Little, Brown Spark, 2021.

2. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/books/review/noise-daniel-kahneman-olivier-sibony-cass-sunstein.html

3. Kirkus Reviews. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-kahneman/noise-flaw/

4. Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316451406 

Please relate my findings and ideas to your own interests and expertise. Please contribute something beyond my scope and ability. Please submit brief relevant essays.                                                                                                                                

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney: Its unlabeled, unintentional, unacknowledged evidence of multiple personality is significant, because there is nothing unusual about this novel and author

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney: Protagonist has episodes of self-mutilation, a common symptom of multiple personality disorder

For example, “Then I scratched my arm open until it bled, just a faint spot of blood, widening into a droplet” (1, p. 201). Self-mutilation is a hidden behavior in at least a third of MPD patients (2, p. 64). Search “self-mutilation” for elaboration of this subject regarding other novels in past posts.

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney: Protagonist has episode including memory gap, typical of young writer with undiagnosed multiple personality

Frances, first-person protagonist, is a university student and poet.

“I didn’t have class until three…I didn’t plan to write a story, I just noticed after some time that I wasn’t hitting the return key and that the lines were forming full sentences and attaching to each other like prose. When I stopped, I had written over three thousand words. It was past three o’clock and I hadn’t eaten…It was the first story I ever wrote” (1, p. 202).

She has a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, a memory gap, for the period of time during which an alternate personality evidently took over and wrote the story.

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney: Why does the novel say and repeat that the protagonist has “no real personality”?

It does not say she is “finding herself” or “in the closet.”

It does say she is bisexual in that she has had both lesbian and heterosexual relationships. But if she were a bisexual, per se, then she would have a real personality: Her single, consistent, personality would be bisexual. However, she is not described as consistently attracted to both men and women, so that is not her real personality.

My answer as to how someone can have no particular single personality is that they have multiple personality.

As I proceed to read the last third of this novel, I will see if it provides a better explanation.

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney (post 2): Some of the protagonist’s peculiar, multiple personality-related thoughts that are rarely, if ever, mentioned in reviews

Approaching the midpoint of this novel, I look back at some of the interesting things that Frances, the first-person protagonist, has said [in bold with added comments]:

“I liked to sit in the library to write essays, allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve…” (1, p. 33).[host personality allows switch to alternate personality]

“Even looking in the mirror made me nervous…Eventually the features of my face seemed to come apart from one another or at least lose their ordinary relationships to each other…” (1, p. 35). [Persons with multiple personality see odd things in mirror due to mixture of images of various personalities.]

“I was aware of the fact that he [Nick, a professional actor] could pretend to be anyone he wanted to be, and I wondered if he also lacked ‘a real personality’ the same as I did” (1, p. 37). [Reiterates protagonist's host personality facade.]

“I tried stamping my feet as loudly as I could to distract myself from bad thoughts, but people gave me curious looks and I felt cowed. I knew that was weak of me. Bobbi [her girlfriend and former lover] was never cowed by strangers” (1, p. 50). [Bad thoughts from alternate personalities.]

At the end of a visit with her father, she cleaned his kitchen. “Watching the soap bubbles slide silently down the blades of the kitchen knives, I had a sudden desire to harm myself. Instead I put away the salt and pepper shakers…” (1, p. 51). [From an alternate personality.]

Visiting Melissa’s and Nick’s house, “For a few seconds I imagined that this was my house, that I had grown up here, and the things in it belonged to me” (1, p. 53). [Odd fantasy from an alternate personality.]

“Eventually Nick looked over and I looked back. I felt a key turning hard inside my body, turning so forcefully that I could do nothing to stop it…Neither of us gestured or waved, we just looked at one another, as if we were already having a private conversation that couldn’t be overheard” (1, pp. 64-65). [From an alternate personality.]

“I hadn’t really wanted to feel sympathetic to Melissa, and now I felt her moving outside my frame of sympathy entirely, as if she belonged to a different story with different characters. When we went upstairs I told Nick I had never had sex with a man before…But when he asked me if I was sure I wanted to do all this, I heard myself say: I didn’t really come over just to talk, you know” (1, p. 68). [Out of character attitude from an alternate personality.]

“…what I found most endearing about him…was that he was attracted to plain and emotionally cold women like me” (1, p. 81). Her personalities differ with each other in their sexual feelings.] 

“I fantasized about punching myself in the stomach” (1, p. 132). [Arguing with or impulses to assault oneself are typical of persons with more than one personality.]

Comments [added Oct. 5] 

Peculiarities and inconsistencies above in bold with added comments. Most readers gloss over these things that make no sense to them and which they do not recognize to be a kind of thing explainable by the presence of alternate personalities.

They are not labeled in the novel as having to do with multiple personality, because the author did not think of it in those terms and had no intention of raising that issue, which evidently reflected the author's own psychology. 

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

The Host Personality Facade: Sally Rooney’s protagonist and in Joyce Carol Oates’ video

In Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, “Bobbi (the first-person narrating protagonist’s best girlfriend) has told Frances that “she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality’…Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am” (1, p. 18).

In Joyce Carol Oates’ video, she says that her personality comes and goes. Her husband thinks she always has a personality, because one always comes out when she’s with him, but when she’s not with him, that personality disappears and she’s like “a transparent glass of water” (2).

In short, the false appearance that this character and writer have single, continuously present personalities is a host personality facade.

Nevertheless, both character and writer are highly intelligent, well-functioning people.

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

2. Writer Joyce Carol Oates at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEnROS8bcTI

“Conversations With Friends” (post 1) by Sally Rooney (post 3): Protagonist unintentionally introduced as student and poet with multiple personality

In “A Conversation with Sally Rooney”( 2018) at the back of this edition of her first novel, she says, “The four central characters came to me almost fully formed, long before I had any real idea of a plot, voice, or setting…People often accuse me of talking about my characters as if they’re real people, truly an unfortunate habit—and my only defense is that, to me, they are” (1, pp. 313-315).

If the author doesn’t recall creating the four central characters, then I can think of two possibilities: Either an alternate personality did create them and provide them to her for this novel, or these “characters” were some of the author’s alternate personalities, who agreed to be used as characters. But I have no way of knowing the actual details.

The first-person narrator, Frances, who says she has “a rich inner life, believe me” (1, p. 14), virtually declares having multiple personality: “Bobbi [her best girlfriend] told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality,’ but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am” (1, p. 18).

Frances’s host personality “could do or say anything,” depending on which of her alternate personalities had taken control.

Moreover, the host or regular personality is usually not the person’s original personality, may be only a facade, and may itself be composed of several personalities, addressing different social situations.

1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

Added Oct. 2: Reading a little further, with Frances as the first-person narrator, I'm wondering how that worked, if the characters are real people, to her, Sally Rooney (see above). Did Rooney experience herself as switching personalities to become Frances, to narrate as her? Or did Rooney just write down what she heard Frances say? Interviewers should ask Rooney what she meant.

Sally Rooney on her characters (post 2): Her regular personality has no memory for creating them, but knows, rationally, that she must have created them

In my recent post, I cited a video interview (1) and commented: She says that the characters just walked into her brain fully formed. She does not know where they came from. But since they could not have been created by anyone but her, they must have been created by a part of her mind of which she is not aware: a conscious, creative, story-telling, alternate personality. However, neither the author nor the interviewer reason this out.

In another interview, Rooney says this: “I suppose when I first met these characters, I felt like, they were already fully formed and it was my job to find out what was going on with them. Of course, that’s not actually true, and sometimes I have to remind myself, 'You made it up! They did not arrive fully formed. You made it all up!' But I can’t accept that" (2).

Comment

Her subjective experience is that she did not create the characters (because she has no memory of doing so). But she knows, rationally, that she must have created them. The solution to this mystery is that her regular personality has a memory gap for what an alternate personality did.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIGSMGdgCyQ

2. https://hazlitt.net/feature/im-not-so-interested-feelings-people-go-through-their-own-interview-sally-rooney

3. Wikipedia. Sally Rooney. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Rooney

“Beach Read” by Emily Henry (post 3): People contain multitudes, may split in two, and author experiences protagonist as growing outside of her

When I read that this bestseller was about two novelists who help each other overcome writer’s block, I was hoping it would describe subjective experiences of the writing process. But the main experiences described are sexual encounters between the two novelists from the woman’s point of view.

In the rest of the novel, all I have found of relevance here are passing comments, suggestive of multiple personality, that apparently reflect the author’s view of human nature and of the way she experiences her characters.

People Contain Multitudes (Alternate Personalities)

“Your mother has been a lot of people in the twenty years I’ve known her…You have to keep falling in love with every new version of each other” (1, p.219).

Person Splits Apart (Into Different Personalities)

“I felt like I was coming apart…and I was going to split” (1, p. 331).

Character Grows Apart From Author (Like Alternate Personality)

“January [the protagonist] grew far outside of me [Emily Henry], until she was a full, real character. A thorny, messy, heartbroken woman with a lush, meaningful story (1, Readers Guide).

But aren’t those metaphors? Yes, but they may be what I call “subjectively experienced metaphors” (search).

1. Emily Henry. Beach Read. New York, Jove, 2020.

Characters Suddenly Appear: If fully-formed characters that a novelist doesn’t know, suddenly appear, does the novelist have a memory gap for creating them? Yes.

Sally Rooney video interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIGSMGdgCyQ

[Added Sept. 28: She says that the characters just walked into her brain fully formed. She does not know where they came from. But since they could not have been created by anyone but her, they must have been created by a part of her mind of which she is not aware: a conscious, creative, story-telling, alternate personality. However, neither the author nor the interviewer reason this out.]

“Beach Read” by Emily Henry (post 2): Words and ideas inadvertently suggestive of multiple personality

“Transformative”

January, the protagonist, a romance novelist, says, “what I loved about the genre—that reading and writing it was nearly as all-consuming and transformative as actually falling in love” (1, p. 11). The word “transformative” goes beyond identifying with or empathizing with, and suggests that the writer virtually switches into the personalities of the characters who fall in love.

“Parts”

“God, what had I done? I should have known better. And then there was the part of me that couldn’t stop thinking, Am I going to do it again?” (1, p. 161). The voice or thought of the “part” (alternate personality) is written in italics, as is often the case in novels.

“And a small, stupid part of me even resented that Gus had secretly loved someone enough to marry her” (1, p.172). The “part” had a mind of its own.

“Fugue state” and discovered personalities

January and Gus go to a crowded dance, and they both become intoxicated, but that may not explain her own “dancing fugue state” and that “This was a different Gus than I’d seen” (1, p. 191).

“Fugue” implies amnesia, but since there is no other reference to amnesia for attendance at the dance, the “dancing fugue” may have been a multiple personality memory gap. And since a “different Gus” is similar to the “old” and “new” versions of the protagonist, January, mentioned at the beginning of the novel (see post 1), this is a continuation of the idea that people have various personalities, which would also include January’s late beloved father, whom she thought had been faithful to her mother, but had had a mistress and another home.

1. Emily Henry. Beach Read. New York, Jove, 2020.

Alternate personalities, who feel they are people in their own right, don’t believe in the diagnosis of multiple personality, and are against it

Most people with multiple personality in real life—for example, novelists and poets—are intriguing

“Beach Read” by Emily Henry (post 1): Novelists January, age 29, and Gus, 32, agree to help each other overcome writer’s block in this witty bestseller

What is January’s problem? She has reasons to be depressed: She doesn’t have much money, her father recently died, she is living alone in the house he shared with his mistress, and she can’t get her next novel started, which is unusual for her.

But January does not express her distress in terms of depression. Instead, she refers to herself as having been the “old January” (1, pp. 11, 22, 30) before she had writer’s block, and as becoming the “new January” (1, p. 41) after she starts to work with Gus.

She doesn’t describe her problem in terms of mood, because she experiences herself as having had a change in personality: the way her mind works, the way she behaves, and the way she relates to people. She feels different.

She may at times hear a voice in her head (written in italics): “That already happened. Last year. And it didn’t kill you, so neither will this” (1, p. 4). And she refers to “a part of me” (1, p. 4). Persons with multiple personality may hear alternate personalities as voices in their head. And “parts” is a common way that people refer to their undiagnosed alternate personalities.

She talks to herself in the mirror (1, p. 51), as persons with multiple personality sometimes do. And she speaks of herself as once having been “torn in half” (1, p. 86).

Comment

Multiple personality is an unintentional subtext in the beginning of this novel. As I read on, I will see if there is anything more explicit. If you are new to this blog, please search “subjectively experienced metaphors,” “voices,” “italics,” “mirrors,” and “unacknowledged multiple personality” for related past posts.

1. Emily Henry. Beach Read. New York, Jove, 2020.

Synesthesia previously mentioned in 2015 post on subjectively experienced metaphors

August 3, 2015

Subjectively Experienced Metaphors (SEMs): Rather than being analogies, some metaphors are subjective experiences; e.g., synesthesia or multiple personality

Most people think of metaphors as analogies or connections between previously unrelated things, which may be true for most metaphors. However, some metaphors may reflect actual subjective experiences.

One such type of metaphor, synesthetic metaphors, may reflect the writer’s synesthesia. For an outline of the types of synesthesia—actual subjective experiences on which certain metaphors could be based—see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia.

Another category of metaphor is personification. An example would be to attribute a human voice, with a mind of its own, to a fictional character, as when a novelist, in an interview, says, “When I heard the character’s voice, and the character came alive to me, I knew I had a novel.”

That is usually considered metaphorical, since “everyone knows” that characters don’t really exist or have voices or minds of their own that the novelist actually hears. But what if novelists say they actually do hear a voice in their head? And what if, according to novelists, the voice says things that the novelist hadn’t thought of? If novelists actually do have those subjective experiences, is what they say in interviews a metaphor?

(As readers of this blog know, I consider autonomous characters with minds of their own to be equivalent to alternate personalities in multiple personality.)

Well, in one sense it is a metaphor, but in another sense it isn’t. It is a metaphor, because characters don’t really exist. It is not a metaphor, because novelists honestly feel that they are reporting an experience.

The only name for this that I’ve thought of is: Subjectively Experienced Metaphors (SEMs). Maybe you can think of a better name. Or maybe there already is a name for this that I haven’t heard.