“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion (post 7): Italics used for a comment by an alternate personality

Chapter 14 of this first-person memoir concludes with one sentence in italics:

“…I was not actually holding myself responsible. I was holding John [her late husband] and Quintana [her daughter] responsible, a significant difference but not one that took me anywhere I needed to be. For once in your life just let it go” (1, p. 174).

She does not write the last sentence in her own voice, which would have been: “For once in my life, I needed to just let it go”; or simply, “I needed to let it go.”

Instead, she abandons first-person and writes it as though another person were telling her what her attitude should be. And this other person speaks in italics.

I have cited the same thing in many past posts regarding the novels of many writers. It typically occurs in a dialogue or argument between a character and a voice in the character’s head.

Indeed, I have seen this so often, with so many different writers, that I consider it a literary convention: Novelists often use italics to indicate when one of a character’s alternate personalities is talking (although the novelist is probably not thinking of it in terms of multiple personality, per se).

1. Joan Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking [2005]. New York, Vintage International, 2007.