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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Friday, October 8, 2021

“Conversations With Friends” by Sally Rooney: Protagonist has episode including memory gap, typical of young writer with undiagnosed multiple personality


Frances, first-person protagonist, is a university student and poet.


“I didn’t have class until three…I didn’t plan to write a story, I just noticed after some time that I wasn’t hitting the return key and that the lines were forming full sentences and attaching to each other like prose. When I stopped, I had written over three thousand words. It was past three o’clock and I hadn’t eaten…It was the first story I ever wrote” (1, p. 202).


She has a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, a memory gap, for the period of time during which an alternate personality evidently took over and wrote the story.


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

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