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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Thursday, October 7, 2021

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney: Why does the novel say and repeat that the protagonist has “no real personality”?


It does not say she is “finding herself” or “in the closet.”


It does say she is bisexual in that she has had both lesbian and heterosexual relationships. But if she were a bisexual, per se, then she would have a real personality: Her single, consistent, personality would be bisexual. However, she is not described as consistently attracted to both men and women, so that is not her real personality.


My answer as to how someone can have no particular single personality is that they have multiple personality.


As I proceed to read the last third of this novel, I will see if it provides a better explanation.


1. Sally Rooney. Conversations With Friends. New York, Hogarth, 2017.

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