Lisa Gardner: New York Times’ new interview and my past post on her multiple personality novel, “Catch Me”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/24/books/review/lisa-gardner-by-the-book-interview.html 

2016

The Bestselling D. D. Warren thriller “Catch Me” by Lisa Gardner: Three characters have multiple personality, but D. D. is not particularly interested.

Charlene is a young woman who, as a child, had suffered horrendous physical and emotional abuse by her mother. Since then, she has had the memory gaps—search “memory gap” and “memory gaps”—typical of multiple personality: She says, “Time escapes me, days, weeks. Entire conversations with my best friends…” (pp. 100-101).

Christine, Charlene’s mother, now deceased, but often referred to in flashbacks and retrospect, is described as “powered by madness” (p. 7), “crazy” (p. 101), “Munchausen’s by proxy” (p. 171), “psychopath” (p. 270), and having “psychosis” (p. 349). “She’d been insane in the truest sense of the word. Unpredictable, unstable, unreliable. Driven by wild ambitions and deeper, darker bouts of despair. She loved, she hated” (p. 354). The Munchausen’s diagnosis is not a psychosis and is applied incorrectly to the behavior described. Psychopath is different from both psychosis and Munchausen’s. In short, there is no consistent, serious attempt to understand the nature of the mother’s disturbed behavior.

Detective O, who has joined D. D.’s detective squad in this novel, is eventually discovered to be Charlene’s long lost younger sister, Abigail, and  also a serial murderer. (Charlene had been the primary suspect.)

Detective O is the one who suggests that Charlene has “multiple personalities.” And as noted above, Charlene does have multiple personality. But that is mostly forgotten about when it is discovered that she is not the serial killer.

The real serial killer has left written notes with the victims that have two messages, one in regular ink and the other in disappearing ink. The two messages are contradictory and written in different handwritings, which suggests that the murderer has multiple personality.

In short, both sisters, Charlene and Detective O/Abigail, are found to have multiple personality. But this is mostly forgotten about once the murders are solved.

Moreover, there are indications that the mother had multiple personality, too. In the novel’s Prologue, six-year-old Abigail is described as trying to cope with one of her mother’s episodes of violent, delusional behavior. Abigail's pleas with “mommy” to stop are to no avail, so she changes the way she addresses her mother as follows:

“Christine!” [said the little girl] changing tactics…”Christine! Stop it! This is no time to play with matches!”…Her mother blinked…She stared at her daughter, right arm falling lax to her side…Her mother stared at her. Seemed confused, which was better than crazy” (pp. 5-6).

What appears to be happening is that the mother’s craziness is the behavior of an alternate personality who had some name other than Christine. Since, in multiple personality, the most effective way to prompt a switch in personalities is to address the person by the name of a different personality, when the girl addresses her mother as “Christine,” that causes a switch to the mother’s regular personality, Christine, who was confused to find herself in a situation that she didn’t remember getting into. Unfortunately, this tactic worked only temporarily, and the mother switched back to the disturbed personality.

In short, there is good reason to believe that three characters in this novel have multiple personality: both sisters and their mother. This is two more than is necessary for a multiple personality plot gimmick. So even if D. D. Warren is not that interested in multiple personality, Lisa Gardner may be.

1. Lisa Gardner. Catch Me. New York, Dutton/Penguin, 2012.