“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith (post 4): When, on the last page, Francie says, “Good-bye, Francie,” to whom does she refer?

When I was growing up, my family and friends called me “Kenny,” and they still do. For me to say “Good-bye, Kenny” would be absurd.

And undoubtedly, the people closest to Francie (who is now almost seventeen and about to attend college out of town) will continue to call her “Francie.” So what does she mean by “Good-bye, Francie”? (1, p. 493).

To whom, or to what, does she refer?

On the preceding page, she identifies that Francie as being a girl aged “ten” (1, p. 492). Thus, she is distinguishing herself from a 10-year-old, child-aged alternate personality that she expects to play a much less significant role in her life from then on.

Since there is no indication that the character or narrator thinks in terms of alternate personalities, per se, this novel is another example of unacknowledged multiple personality.

1. Betty Smith. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn [1943]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. 

“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith (post 3): Dialogue between M. Frances K. Nolan and Francie, alternate personalities with tricky names

A person with multiple personality has two or more “I’s.” Note the two “I’s”—“I, M. Frances K. Nolan” and “I [Francie] feel sick”—in the following passage:

“Francie started to feel sick…It couldn’t have been anything she ate because she had forgotten to eat lunch. Then a thunderous thought came to her.

“My grandparents never knew how to read or write. Those who came before them couldn’t read or write. My mother’s sister can’t read or write. My parents never even graduated from grade school. I never went to high school. But I, M. Frances K. Nolan, am now in college. Do you hear that, Francie? You’re in college!

“Oh, gosh, I feel sick” (1, pp. 429-430).

Comment

In multiple personality, names of alternate personalities may be seemingly trivial variations of the person’s legal name:

“Most personalities will have a name. Often they will have first and last and even middle names; in many cases, the names are some derivative of the legal name. So…Elizabeth Jane Doe might well have alter personalities with the first names of Elizabeth, Lizzy, Liz, Betsie, Beth, Bets, Jane, Janie, Lizzy-Jane, and so on…” (2, p. 116).

Tricky naming is one way that multiple personality evades diagnosis.

1. Betty Smith. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn [1943]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

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

Francine Prose (post 3): She describes her process, which could mean switching personalities

“I hate the word process, I just can’t bear it,” Prose said in an interview. “People say, ‘What’s your process?’ My process is allowing my soul to leave my body and enter into the body of another human being. So try that!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/books/francine-prose-vixen.html

“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith (post 2): Francie’s lying, due to her mythopoetic alternate personality, suggests she become a fiction writer

As noted in post 1, when Francie was alone, an alternate personality made up, and told her, stories. However, she was not always alone. And by the time she was ten, she was making things up and telling lies to her parents and teacher.

“She hated whatever that thing was inside her that made her invent such whoppers…Lately, she had been given to exaggerating things. She did not report happenings truthfully, but gave them color, excitement and dramatic twists. Katie [her mother] was annoyed at this tendency and kept warning Francie to tell the plain truth and to stop romancing. But Francie just couldn’t tell the plain undecorated truth. She had to put something to it.

“Although Katie had this same flair for coloring incident and Johnny [Francie’s father] himself lived in a half-dream world, yet they tried to squelch these things in their child…"

Fortunately, a kind teacher told her: “You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.”

“It was the best advice Francie ever got…Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing” (1, pp. 198-199).

Comment

What was once thought of as “the mythopoetic function of the unconscious” (2, p. 318), I would reframe as the proclivity of some alternate personalities to make up stories. And for such a person, fiction writing is a natural choice.

1. Betty Smith. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn [1943]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

2. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York, Basic Books, 1970. 

“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith (post 1): Francie and her father have alternate personalities, but multiple personality, per se, is unintentional

At the beginning of this semi-autobiographical novel (1), Francie Nolan, a preadolescent girl, is a loner. Other children think that she and her family are peculiar. Her mother reads her one page of Shakespeare and one page of the Bible every day, which sometimes affects Francie’s vocabulary. Her Aunt Sissy’s flirty behavior distracts men and upsets women in the neighborhood. And her father, who drinks, works as a singing waiter, irregularly.

Francie

“So in the warm summer days the lonesome child sat on her stoop and pretended disdain for the group of children playing on the sidewalk. Francie played with imaginary companions and made believe that they were better than real children…

“Francie played jacks by herself, first being Francie and then her opponent. She’d talk to the imaginary player. ‘I’m for threesies and you’re for twosies,’ she’d say” (2, pp. 110-112).

“What are you thinking about, little girl?”

“Just thinking,” Francie said.

“Sometimes I see you sitting on the gutter curb for hours. What do you think of then?”

“Nothing. I just tell myself stories.”

Miss Tynmore pointed at her sternly. “Little girl, you’ll be a story writer when you grow up.” It was a command rather than a statement.

“Yes, ma’am,” agreed Francie out of politeness” (2, p. 141).

Her Father

“When he was drunk, he was a quiet man. He didn’t brawl, he didn’t sing, he didn’t grow sentimental. He grew thoughtful. People who didn’t know him thought that he was drunk when he was sober, because sober, he was full of song and excitement. When he was drunk, strangers looked on him as a quiet, thoughtful man who minded his own business.

“Francie dreaded the drinking periods—not on moral grounds but because Papa wasn’t a man she knew then. He wouldn’t talk to her or to anybody. He looked at her with the eyes of a stranger. When Mama spoke to him, he turned his head away from her.

“When he got over a drinking time, he’d take a notion that he had to be a better father to his children” (2, p. 190).

Comment

Francie, aside from playing with imaginary companions (a normal, childhood version of multiple personality), tells herself stories. Note how that is phrased. She doesn’t say that she thinks of stories, but that she tells herself stories. The latter implies two personalities, one who is telling the story and one who is listening to it.

Regarding her father, note that “Papa wasn’t a man she knew then…He looked at her with the eyes of a stranger.” That implies his having an alternate personality that didn’t relate to her. Indeed, he appears to have three personalities: the singing waiter, the drunk stranger, and the attentive father.

1. Wikipedia. “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (novel).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tree_Grows_in_Brooklyn_(novel)

2. Betty Smith. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn [1943]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

Do any fiction writers have mutually aware collaboration among all personalities, or, like Mark Twain, do some “fill the tank” behind the scenes?

Successful fiction writers would be well paid to eventually publish a detailed analysis of each work—how they wrote it and what it means—so why don’t they?

Are the reasons they give merely excuses and rationalizations?

Have the ninety percent of fiction writers who have multiple personality trait discussed it with fellow fiction writers? Could they? Would they? Should they?

“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” by Anita Loos: Early in this “great American novel,” the protagonist’s alternate personality shoots a man

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was praised by William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, H. G. Wells, and Edith Wharton, who called it “the great American novel” (1).

In the author’s preface, “The Biography of a Book,” Anita Loos, a brunette, explains that she was inspired to write the book, because she resented the fact that men did show a preference for blondes. And she intended her blonde protagonist, Lorelie, “to be a symbol of the lowest possible mentality of our nation” (2, p. xxxix).

However, the author cautions the reader not to think that her novel is merely a joke. “In fact, if one examines the plot of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, it is almost as gloomy as a novel by Dostoievski…It concerns early rape of its idiot heroine” and “an attempt by her to commit murder” that is “only unsuccessful because she is clumsy with a gun” (2, pp. xxxviii-xxxix).

However, in the novel, itself, Lorelie’s failed attempt to commit murder is not a funny example of clumsiness, but an attempt to commit murder by an alternate personality, for which Lorelie’s regular personality has amnesia; that is, she has had a multiple personality memory gap:

“So when I [Lorelie] found out that girls like that paid calls on Mr. Jennings I had quite a bad case of histerics [sic] and my mind was really a blank and when I came out of it, it seems that I had a revolver in my hand and it seems the revolver had shot Mr. Jennings” (2, p. 25).

As in most novels, the issue of multiple personality, per se, is unacknowledged.

1. Wikipedia. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (novel).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen_Prefer_Blondes_(novel)

2. Anita Loos. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925) and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1927). New York, Penguin Books, 1998.

Added June 20: The rest of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has nothing relevant here. And since its sequel is not considered to be up to its standard, I will not pursue it. 

“The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D.: Nonfiction bestseller on multiple personality in PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder)

“Dissociation is the essence of trauma” (1, p. 66). “…the problem with PTSD is dissociation…” (1, pp. 182-183). And as Dr. van der Kolk knows, multiple personality disorder, also known as “dissociative identity disorder,” is the premier dissociative disorder in the diagnostic manual (DSM-5).

Dr. van der Kolk does diagnose multiple personality when he sees it in its rare, atypical, overt, “classic” presentation: “It was early in my career, and I had been seeing Mary, a shy…young woman…for about three months in weekly psychotherapy…One day I opened the door to my waiting room and saw her standing there provocatively dressed in a miniskirt, her hair dyed flaming red, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a snarl on her face. ‘You must be Dr. van der Kolk,’ she said. ‘My name is Jane, and I came to warn you not to believe any of the lies that Mary has been telling you…’ Over the course of our session I met not only Jane but also a hurt little girl and an angry male adolescent. That was the beginning of a long and productive treatment. Mary was my first encounter with dissociative identity disorder (DID), which at that time was called multiple personality disorder…Exploring—even befriending—those parts is an important component of healing” (1, pp. 279-280).

But, judging by this book, he may fail to diagnose multiple personality in some other cases that he should have: “For example, one woman [in a study] described her plans for the day in a childlike, high-pitched voice, but a few minutes later, when she described stealing one hundred dollars from an open cash register, both the volume and pitch of her voice became so much lower that she sounded like an entirely different person. Alterations in emotional states were also reflected in the subjects’ handwriting. As participants changed topics, they might move from cursive to block letters and back to cursive; there were also variations in the slant of the letters and in the pressure of their pens. Such changes are called ‘switching’ in clinical practice, and we see them often in individuals with trauma histories…Switching manifests not only as remarkably different vocal patterns but also in different facial expressions and body movements. Some patients even appear to change their personal identity, from timid to forceful and aggressive or from anxiously compliant to starkly seductive. When they write about their deepest fears, their handwriting often becomes more childlike and primitive” (1, pp. 243-244).

Dr. van der Kolk may mistake a stabilizing technique for definitive treatment: “Lisa recalled dissociating when she was a little girl, but things got worse after puberty: ‘I started waking up with cuts, and people at school would know me by different names. I couldn’t have a steady boyfriend because I would date other guys when I was dissociated and then not remember. I was blacking out a lot and opening my eyes into some pretty strange situations.’ Like many severely traumatized people, Lisa could not recognize her self in a mirror [seen in multiple personality]. I had never heard of anyone describe so articulately what is was like to lack a continuous sense of self [the essence of multiple personality]. There was no one to confirm her reality…'They took me to the emergency room, but I couldn’t tell the doctor what I had done to cut myself—I didn’t have any memory of it. The ER doctor was convinced that dissociative identity disorder didn’t exist…” (1, pp. 319-320). Dr. van der Kolk does not name it that either, and is happy to report that Lisa was treated with neurofeedback. She improved, which only means that she was out of crisis, not that her multiple personality would not become overt again during the next crisis.

Comment

Multiple personality symptoms are usually hidden, and when you get rid of overt symptoms, you are just getting them back inside, where they usually are. Calming the personalities is only the initial, stabilization phase of therapy.

I still don’t think that most cases of PTSD are due to multiple personality. But after seeing Dr. van der Kolk’s authoritative, nonfiction book—which I was prompted to get by my having read James Hilton’s Random Harvest recently, and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy previously—I suspect that multiple personality may be more common than I thought among persons diagnosed with PTSD.

Fortunately, judging by my own clinical experience, and as reported by Dr. van der Kolk in the case that he did diagnose multiple personality, psychotherapy may be successful.

1. Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York, Penguin Books, 2014.

“Random Harvest” by James Hilton (post 2): Protagonist’s perfectly evident multiple personality is not labeled and acknowledged as such

Charles Ranier is portrayed as having two personalities that have memory gaps for each other’s existence, which fulfill the main, formal diagnostic criteria for multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder). His switches from one personality to the other are prompted by two traumatic experiences.

The first trauma, shell-shock on the WWI battlefield, prompts a switch from his regular Charles Ranier personality to a confused, nameless personality. He is committed to a psychiatric hospital. He escapes and is befriended by a young actress, whom he knows by her stage name. She realizes that he’s not really crazy, helps him to live a normal life, and chooses a name for him (Mr. Smith or Smithy). They eventually marry.

The second trauma occurs when Smith visits Liverpool to see an editor for help in his new career as a writer. Smith is knocked unconscious in an accident, wakes up as Charles Ranier, and returns to his wealthy family in another city, with no memory of his life as Smith.

Many years later, Ranier starts to remember his time as Smith. And even though he is now happily married, he wants to search for his first wife, his long lost love. The novel ends as his current wife drives to the place where she knows she’ll find him looking for his old love, and “…she ran into his arms calling out: ‘Oh, Smithy—Smithy—it may not be too late! (1, last line). [He is married to his first love, but his Ranier personality hadn't recognized her.]

Comment

Since the novel, itself, does not explicitly refer to multiple personality or split personality, it is uncertain that the author knew he was portraying his protagonist as having multiple personality, per se.

One reason he may not have known it, is that when this novel was written, classical Freudian theory, which had a blind spot for multiple personality, was still popular.

And the fact that one of the protagonist’s alternate personalities was a writer, supports the probability that the unacknowledged multiple personality in this novel reflected the author’s psychology.

1. James Hilton. Lost Horizon (1933), Good-Bye, Mr. Chips (1934), Random Harvest (1941) (pp. 203-438). Garden City NY, Nelson Doubleday, Book Club Edition.

Blog Title Change: Second line changed from “Excellent Memory with Meaningful Memory Gaps” to “Excellent Memory, Tends To Ignore Memory Gaps”

Memory gaps are one of the main symptoms of multiple personality. They occur when the regular, host personality has amnesia for the time that an alternate personality had come out and been in control.

Persons with multiple personality may infer that they have had a memory gap if they seem to “lose time” or something significant that they can’t account for seems to have occurred, but they tend to remain silent about their memory gaps.

So to find out if they have memory gaps, you usually have to ask, and they have to trust you. 

Mistaken belief in “the unconscious” may lead to misinterpretation of amnesia, and failure to recognize a character’s multiple personality

Freud didn’t discover “the unconscious.” He learned about it when he studied hypnosis. Hypnotists had long known that some people had amnesia for what had happened during hypnosis. And if the hypnotized person had been given a suggestion for what to do after hypnosis, the person would do it, but not recall having been told to do so.

But if the person were hypnotized again, they would recall everything that had previously been said and done during hypnosis. Thus, what was “unconscious” when out of hypnosis, was so only from the point of view of the non-hypnotic consciousness. It was always perfectly conscious to the hypnotized mind, which, in order to make the nonhypnotized person carry out the suggestion, had to remain conscious when the person was not hypnotized.

In short, there were two simultaneous consciousnesses, but only one was aware of the other.

So why didn’t Freud recognize that there was no true “unconscious,” but only two segregated or dissociated consciousnesses? Two reasons. First, he wanted to distinguish himself from the French psychiatrist, Pierre Janet, who had already gotten credit for “psychoanalysis” that involved “dissociation” (among segregated consciousnesses). To distinguish his own brand of “psychoanalysis,” Freud coined “repression” (into the unconscious). Second, Freud, himself, had problems with dissociative tendencies (see past post with essay on Freud) and needed to avoid the issue.

Now, it certainly is possible to have amnesia with no retention of memory, such as when the memory was not recorded in the first place. But when a character in a novel has amnesia, consider the possibility that the memory is present in an alternate consciousness, an alternate personality. 

“Random Harvest” by James Hilton (post 1): Precipitated by WWI shell shock, protagonist had had a dissociative fugue lasting years

In 1937, Charles Rainier, an Englishman in his forties, begins to tell his history of amnesia to a stranger on a train, who becomes his friend and narrator. When Rainier had been a soldier on the battlefield in WWI, “a shell screamed over and burst a few yards away, killing the others and wounding him in the head,” which precipitated a three-year-long memory gap. And now, Rainier says, “Sometimes I have a feeling of being—if it isn’t too absurd to say such a thing—of being half somebody else” (1. pp. 207-208).

“From that moment of being knocked out my memory’s a complete blank till years later when I found myself lying on a park seat in Liverpool.”

“Years later?”

“Getting on for three years…You don’t find my story very plausible?

“I might if you’d tell me the whole of it—without gaps.”

“But there are gaps—that’s just the trouble.”

“What were you doing in Liverpool?”

“…I didn’t even know it was Liverpool at first. The main thing was to know who I was…”

“Do you mean you’d been going by some other name until then?”

“Maybe. I suppose so. That’s another thing I don’t know. It's as if…there were different rooms in my mind, and as soon as the light came on in one it had to go out in the other…In fact I knew all about myself in a perfectly normal way up to the moment of that shell burst near Arras in 1917 (1, pp. 215-216).

Comment

This novel was James Hilton’s third bestseller, but I haven’t found much written about it, and what I have found, mainly Wikipedia, refers to the protagonist’s amnesia as a symptom of “shell shock.” But that seems to be only the precipitant for a dissociative fugue, usually seen in people with multiple personality. This is consistent with the character’s feeling like he’s “half somebody else.”

Another literary example of a long-lasting dissociative fugue precipitated by a frightening event is the story told by Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930): Search “Flitcraft’s Fugue.”

1. James Hilton. James Hilton’s three famous novels complete in one volume. Lost Horizon (1933), Good-Bye, Mr. Chips (1934), Random Harvest (1941) (pp. 203-438). Garden City NY, Nelson Doubleday, Book Club Edition.

Visitors’ Fearful Silence

Judging by the content of this site, visitors probably include professors of literature or psychology, book reviewers, and fiction writers, but they are afraid to comment. I don’t think they need to fear, certainly not me, but that’s not for me to say.

Eighth Anniversary of “Great Fiction Writers & Multiple Personality Trait,” a literary survey and discussion of the normal version of multiple personality

I am happy that visitors here have been reading past posts much more than they used to. After all, with over 2,000 posts, it is very unlikely that the most recent posts, whichever they happen to be, will be the best ones.

I am unhappy that most people in the world still seem to think that other things are more important to them than searching and reading this blog. Most people are self-centered. Some people are selves-centered.

But I am mostly happy. When I see which past posts are getting the most attention, I may reread them. And often I think, yes, that was a good one.

“The Mysterious Affair at Styles” by Agatha Christie (post 11): Evelyn Howard has dual nature, changes personality, assumes other identities

This is Agatha Christie’s first novel (1), published six years before her famous disappearance, discussed previously. It is a murder mystery that has nothing to do with multiple personality. The following passages were not intended to suggest multiple personality, as far as I know.

“Miss Howard shook hands with a hearty, almost painful, grip…She was a pleasant-looking woman of about forty, with a deep voice, almost manly in its stentorian tones, and had a large sensible square body, with feet to match…” (2, p. 7).

After Hercule Poirot says that Miss Howard may have another side:

“Suddenly she took her face from her hands.

“Yes,” she said quietly, “that was not Evelyn Howard who spoke!” She flung her head up proudly. “This is Evelyn Howard!” (2, p. 131).

“Miss Howard, disguised as Alfred Inglethorp, enters the chemist’s shop…obtains the strychnine, and writes the name of Alfred Inglethorp in John’s handwriting, which she had previously studied carefully” (2, p. 202).

Comment

In a murder mystery that is not supposed to have anything to do with multiple personality, why is a key character written in a way that inadvertently suggests multiple personality? It reflects the author’s psychology.

1. Wikipedia. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Affair_at_Styles

2. Agatha Christie. The Mysterious Affair at Styles [1920]. New York, Vintage Books, 2019. 

“Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days” by Jared Cade vs. “Unfinished Portrait” by Agatha Christie (writing as Mary Westmacott)

Jared Cade is the leading exponent of the opinion that Agatha Christie’s amnesia during her disappearance was faked. So I looked to see what he says about Unfinished Portrait, Agatha Christie’s autobiographical novel, written under her pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. (An Autobiography written as Agatha Christie does not mention the disappearance.)

Cade says that “Unfinished Portrait is in many ways an autobiographical novel, tracing Agatha’s life from early childhood through her marriage to Archie and its painful dissolution. The characters of Celia and Dermot are based on the Christies, and there is a raw emotional quality to it that reflects how close it was to her own experience…

“Celia is horrified when Dermot suggests a put-up job for a divorce in which his mistress’s name is not to be mentioned…

“Unfinished Portrait recreates certain events from the day of Agatha’s disappearance…” (1, pp. 195-197).

However, Cade fails to mention what was most relevant:

“She walked for a long time—it was raining and wet…She couldn’t remember what she was walking for…What was her own name? How frightening—she couldn’t remember…” (2, p. 261).

Search “Unfinished Portrait.”

1. Jared Cade. Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days. London, Peter Owen, 1998/2011.

2. Mary Westmacott [pseudonym of Agatha Christie]. Unfinished Portrait [1934]. New York, Jove Books, 1987. 

Mind’s Eye: People and Alternate Personalities Differ

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/science/minds-eye-mental-pictures-psychology.html

https://carlzimmer.com/look-deep-into-the-minds-eye-341/

Can the mind’s eye differ for each of a person’s different personalities? There may be an example of this in my post, “The Red House Mystery” by A. A. Milne (author of “Winnie-the-Pooh”). Search it.

“The Mystery of Mrs. Christie” by Marie Benedict (post 2): Multiple-personality memory gaps of Agatha Christie and/or Marie Benedict

This novel’s conclusion to Agatha Christie’s real-life disappearance is that Mrs. Christie faked amnesia as part of a scheme to get her husband to name his mistress in their ensuing divorce proceedings. It makes no sense. There were much easier ways for her to embarrass him and his mistress, without embarrassing herself.

In an “Author’s Note” at the end of the novel, Marie Benedict admits that she concluded the novel this way, not because of any historical facts, but because Benedict is “a writer on a mission” to write about strong women, and “How could she have suffered from amnesia or gotten herself into some sort of fugue state, as some have theorized?” (1, pp. 263-264).

Ironically, Benedict does portray Agatha Christie, earlier that same year, as having a remarkable memory gap in another emotional situation. Following her mother’s death: “I didn’t remember much of the days that followed—the funeral planning, the travel from Abney to Ashfield, the arrival of family members, the service. Perhaps the gaps in my recollection were a godsend, as by all accounts, I became a howling, sobbing animal” (1, p. 178).

I don’t know whether the latter memory gap was based on any known history of Agatha Christie or reflects the psychology of Marie Benedict.

1. Marie Benedict. The Mystery of Mrs. Christie. Naperville IL, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2021. 

“The Mystery of Mrs. Christie” by Marie Benedict (post 1): As novel on Agatha Christie’s real-life disappearance begins, protagonist hears voices

The author, born Heather Marie Benedict, had been a successful lawyer, but is now a successful novelist, writing some of her novels as Marie Benedict and others as Heather Terrell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Terrell

On one of her two websites, the author says, “As a child, I always adored books in which the characters found a doorway to the past and got to lose themselves in another time and place. I wanted to be those characters. Now, as a writer, I get to fulfill that childhood fantasy of traveling to the past by walking through the doorway of my fiction…

“Marie Benedict…found her calling unearthing the hidden historical stories of women. Her mission is to excavate from the past the most important, complex and fascinating women of history and bring them into the light of present-day where we can finally perceive the breadth of their contributions as well as the insights they bring to modern day issues…” (Marie Benedict website).

“Heather dreamed of a fantastical job unraveling the larger mysteries of time and uncovering the truths lurking in legend and myth -- and found it when she tried her hand at writing. She first wrote…historical novels…[then] made the transition to young adult fiction…and speaks extensively at schools and libraries across the country” (Heather Terrell website).

The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, as it begins, gives its Agatha Christie character, in passing, one amusing attribute unrelated to her later disappearance. On more than one occasion, Agatha, as a young adult, hears her mother’s voice, advising and reprimanding her (1, pp. 7, 16).

Comment

The author’s protagonist hears benign, rational voices, which may reflect the author’s sense of ordinary psychology, based on her own personal experience. When a normal person hears such voices, it may indicate multiple personality trait, a normal version of multiple personality, which is common in great fiction writers. Her use of pseudonyms is consistent with this interpretation.

I will be interested to see what she thinks of Agatha Christie’s disappearance.

1. Marie Benedict. The Mystery of Mrs. Christie. Naperville Illinois, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2021.