Nobel Prize novelist Kazuo Ishiguro quoted on his “parallel lives”: In tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine cover story

Since I have a past post here on Ishiguro’s novel, “Never Let Me Go,” I was interested to see if tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine article quotes Ishiguro about his own psychology. It does.

In a section of the article that begins with the sentence, “What exactly is an individual?”—it quotes Ishiguro on his having two personalities:

“ ‘They’re like parallel lives,’ he [Ishiguro] said, distinguishing between his public self, who gives interviews and wins awards [his host personality], and the private one [his alternate personality], who spends day after day in his study, trying to will imaginary worlds into being” (1).

This is the same kind of fiction writer’s multiple personality that Henry James depicted in his short story, “The Private Life,” and that Margaret Atwood wrote about at length in her nonfiction book, “Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing,” both of which I have previously discussed.

Search “Ishiguro” here to see my 2017 post.

1. Giles Harvey. “The Age of Ishiguro.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/magazine/kazuo-ishiguro-klara.html