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, October 3, 2021

The Host Personality Facade: Sally Rooney’s protagonist and in Joyce Carol Oates’ video


In Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, “Bobbi (the first-person narrating protagonist’s best girlfriend) has told Frances that “she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality’…Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am” (1, p. 18).


In Joyce Carol Oates’ video, she says that her personality comes and goes. Her husband thinks she always has a personality, because one always comes out when she’s with him, but when she’s not with him, that personality disappears and she’s like “a transparent glass of water” (2).


In short, the false appearance that this character and writer have single, continuously present personalities is a host personality facade.


Nevertheless, both character and writer are highly intelligent, well-functioning people.


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

2. Writer Joyce Carol Oates at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEnROS8bcTI

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