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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Monday, September 13, 2021

Pulitzer Prize novelist Richard Powers (post 4) describes latest novel as originating in conversation with child-aged alternate personality


“…while walking in the forest near his home, Powers had a vivid, hallucinatory sensation of carrying a child on his shoulders…During his hikes, he began having conversations with this imaginary child. He started to formulate a story of a father and a son…‘I was deep into the story before I realized that I was writing a book that was trying to re-engage the questions that were left hanging at the end of The Overstory,' Powers said."


Alexandra Alter. The New York Times, September 13, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/books/richard-powers-bewilderment.html


April 15, 2019

“The Overstory” by Richard Powers: Wins 2019 Pulitzer Prize for novel that employed “all my multiple personalities”


“…he has poured plenty of himself into the nine main human characters in The Overstory. The most obvious proxy is Nick Hoel: ‘The introspective midwestern creator and outsider, trying to solve the tensions between that intense introspection of his temperament with the outward ambition of his vocation – that’s me.’ But there’s also Mimi Ma, the engineer who represents the pragmatic path Powers might have taken; Neelay, a programmer who loses himself in alternative worlds, and Douglas, the war veteran to whom the author gave his ‘relentless goofy humour’. ‘It was like a five-year-long therapy session where I let all my multiple personalities off the leash and that was so satisfying’ ” (1).


1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/16/richard-powers-interview-overstory

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