BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

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Sunday, August 22, 2021

“Priestdaddy” memoir and “Rape Joke” poem by Patricia Lockwood (post 3): Did her being “crazy” for five years include multiple personality's memory gaps?


The poem is discussed with her parents in the memoir (1, pp. 113-116), but they do not address what the poem says:


“It was a year before you told your parents, because he [the rapist] was like a son to them” and she was “crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there…” (2).


1. Patricia Lockwood. Priestdaddy. Memoir. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017.

2. “Rape Joke.” https://www.theawl.com/2013/07/patricia-lockwood-rape-joke/


Aug. 23: I finished the memoir and have nothing to add.

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