Mixed reviews of “The Candy House” by Jennifer Egan
https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the-candy-house/
Speculation added 3/31: Is "The Candy House" another novel co-written by alternate personalities she affectionately thinks of as her "goon squad"?
Search “Jennifer Egan” for past posts.
Marital Abuse: Why doesn’t she just leave him?
In the past, when I read the above, cliché question, I often wondered if the abused wife had multiple personality: Maybe she had memory gaps for the episodes of abuse. Maybe she had an alternate personality that was originally, defensively, designed in childhood to appease abusers.
But since reading the novel It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover (1), I realize that it may be the husband who has multiple personality: He may know that he abuses his wife, if he sees her injuries, but he may not actually remember assaulting her if he has multiple personality’s memory gaps. Meanwhile, the wife may never think in terms of multiple personality, per se, because she sees her husband’s regular, loving personality as her true husband, whom she married, but his assaultive, alternate personality as only a temporary aberration triggered by alcohol or stress.
In the novel (1), the husband has multiple personality’s memory gaps, but does not get a correct diagnosis, because, apparently, the author did not know the diagnosis, and was not intentionally writing about multiple personality, per se. Search “Colleen Hoover” to see my posts on several of her novels.
Comment: Many works discussed in this blog—including classics and those written by winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature—have unintended or unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality, probably reflecting the multiple personality trait of most fiction writers.
1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.
“It Ends with Us” (post 4) by Colleen Hoover (post 7): Author misunderstands her novel and possibly herself
“He knows what he’s done. He’s [the nice] Ryle again” (1, p. 266).
Lily, the protagonist, recognizes that there are two Ryles, one that is angry and assaults her, and the other, a nice Ryle, whom she loves. But the author has forgotten that the angry Ryle blacks out (post 3), leaving the nice Ryle with a memory gap. That is, the nice Ryle knows what he’s done only indirectly, through circumstantial evidence (Lily’s injuries, etc.).
Thus, the author does not recognize that she has written a multiple personality scenario, with two Ryle personalities.
Search “unacknowledged multiple personality,” which is a multiple personality scenario that is unlabeled, and is probably a reflection of the author’s own psychology (search “multiple personality trait”).
1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.
“It Ends with Us” (post 3) by Colleen Hoover (post 6): Lily’s husband assaults her while he has a memory gap
Lily, the protagonist, has recently opened a flower shop and married Ryle, a neurosurgeon. She has promised herself never to become a physically abused wife like her mother. But after the second time he assaults her, Ryle confesses that when he was six years old, he accidentally shot his brother to death and “since that happened, there are things I can’t control. I get angry. I black out. I’ve been in therapy since I was six years old. But it is not my excuse. It is my reality…I don’t remember the moment I pushed you [down the stairs]…You are my wife. I’m supposed to be the one who protects you from the monsters. I’m not supposed to be one” (1, p. 241).
Search “memory gap” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.
1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.
“Singular they” (1) could be confused with implying multiple personality
1. Wikipedia. Singular they. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
“It Ends with Us” (post 2) by Colleen Hoover (post 5): Dissociative (multiple personality) talk
“…too many pieces of me are invested in you now…” (1, p. 89).
“You make me want to be a different person…” (1, p. 93).
“I walked straight to the kitchen and I opened a drawer. I grabbed the biggest knife I could find and…I don’t know how to explain it. It was like I wasn’t even in my own body. I could see myself walking across the kitchen with the knife in my hand…” (1, p. 154).
1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.
“It Ends with Us” (post 1) by Colleen Hoover (post 4): Author recalls her traumatic early childhood as partial basis for this novel
Note from the Author
“My earliest memory in life was from the age of two and a half years old…my father picked up our television and threw it at my mother, knocking her down. She divorced him before I turned three…He was an alcoholic…In fact, he told me he had two knuckles replaced in his hand because he had hit her so hard, they broke against her skull. My father regretted the way he treated my mother his entire life…and he said he would grow old and die still madly in love with her” (1, pp. 368-369).
As noted in my introduction to this blog, most adults with multiple personality have had childhood trauma, either as a victim or witness. Search “childhood trauma” for past posts.
1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.
“Slammed” (post 2) by Colleen Hoover (post 3): Protagonist has memory gap and fugue, symptoms of multiple personality
“I don’t remember walking out of the house, and I don’t remember going across the street. The only thing I know is that it’s midnight and I’m beating on Will’s door" (1, p. 178).
Since she travels during the time she can’t recall, it would be called a “dissociative fugue.”
Search “memory gap” and “fugue” for past posts.
1. Colleen Hoover. Slammed. New York, Atria, 2012.
“Slammed” by Colleen Hoover (author post 2): Author’s first novel is about mistaken, multiple identities
Layken, 18, meets Will, 21, and they fall in love before realizing she is a high school senior registered for an elective poetry class that he teaches, causing them to pretend not to know each other.
“We’ve got this whole facade between us, like we’re different people all the time, and it’s exhausting! I never know when you’re Will or Mr. Cooper and I really don’t know when I’m supposed to be Layken or Lake [her nickname]” (1, pp. 133-134).
The author’s multiple personality concerns are camouflaged in a romantic comedy.
1. Colleen Hoover. Slammed. New York, Atria, 2012.
“Verity” by Colleen Hoover: New York Times bestseller’s characters are writers with dissociative symptoms (multiple personality is a dissociative disorder)
Lowen and Verity are two female fiction writers. Verity may or may not be a murderer, since she writes both a confession and a retraction. It is also unclear whether Verity’s muteness after a car accident is brain damage, faking, or a posttraumatic, dissociative symptom (multiple personality is a dissociative disorder).
Lowen, the narrator, also has dissociative states of mind. She has a history of sleepwalking since childhood. One morning, she awoke “with a broken wrist and covered in blood” (1, p. 119).
The author has a sense of humor: "I was good at spewing bullshit. It's why I became a writer" (1, p. 206).
1. Colleen Hoover. Verity. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.
“The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD (post 2)
This New York Times nonfiction bestseller for eighty (80) weeks is known as a book on trauma, but is actually about how experts on trauma like Dr. van der Kolk fail to diagnose multiple personality except when it is obvious.
June 18, 2021
“The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D.: Nonfiction bestseller on multiple personality in PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder)
“Dissociation is the essence of trauma” (1, p. 66). “…the problem with PTSD is dissociation…” (1, pp. 182-183). And as Dr. van der Kolk knows, multiple personality disorder, also known as “dissociative identity disorder,” is the premier dissociative disorder in the diagnostic manual (DSM-5).
Dr. van der Kolk does diagnose multiple personality when he sees it in its rare, atypical, overt, “classic” presentation: “It was early in my career, and I had been seeing Mary, a shy…young woman…for about three months in weekly psychotherapy…One day I opened the door to my waiting room and saw her standing there provocatively dressed in a miniskirt, her hair dyed flaming red, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a snarl on her face. ‘You must be Dr. van der Kolk,’ she said. ‘My name is Jane, and I came to warn you not to believe any of the lies that Mary has been telling you…’ Over the course of our session I met not only Jane but also a hurt little girl and an angry male adolescent. That was the beginning of a long and productive treatment. Mary was my first encounter with dissociative identity disorder (DID), which at that time was called multiple personality disorder…Exploring—even befriending—those parts is an important component of healing” (1, pp. 279-280).
But, judging by this book, he may fail to diagnose multiple personality in some other cases that he should have: “For example, one woman [in a study] described her plans for the day in a childlike, high-pitched voice, but a few minutes later, when she described stealing one hundred dollars from an open cash register, both the volume and pitch of her voice became so much lower that she sounded like an entirely different person. Alterations in emotional states were also reflected in the subjects’ handwriting. As participants changed topics, they might move from cursive to block letters and back to cursive; there were also variations in the slant of the letters and in the pressure of their pens. Such changes are called ‘switching’ in clinical practice, and we see them often in individuals with trauma histories…Switching manifests not only as remarkably different vocal patterns but also in different facial expressions and body movements. Some patients even appear to change their personal identity, from timid to forceful and aggressive or from anxiously compliant to starkly seductive. When they write about their deepest fears, their handwriting often becomes more childlike and primitive” (1, pp. 243-244).
Dr. van der Kolk may mistake a stabilizing technique for definitive treatment: “Lisa recalled dissociating when she was a little girl, but things got worse after puberty: ‘I started waking up with cuts, and people at school would know me by different names. I couldn’t have a steady boyfriend because I would date other guys when I was dissociated and then not remember. I was blacking out a lot and opening my eyes into some pretty strange situations.’ Like many severely traumatized people, Lisa could not recognize her self in a mirror [seen in multiple personality]. I had never heard of anyone describe so articulately what is was like to lack a continuous sense of self [the essence of multiple personality]. There was no one to confirm her reality…'They took me to the emergency room, but I couldn’t tell the doctor what I had done to cut myself—I didn’t have any memory of it. The ER doctor was convinced that dissociative identity disorder didn’t exist…” (1, pp. 319-320). Dr. van der Kolk does not name it that either, and is happy to report that Lisa was treated with neurofeedback. She improved, which only means that she was out of crisis, not that her multiple personality would not become overt again during the next crisis.
Comment
Multiple personality symptoms are usually hidden, and when you get rid of overt symptoms, you are just getting them back inside, where they usually are. Calming the personalities is only the initial, stabilization phase of therapy.
I still don’t think that most cases of PTSD are due to multiple personality. But after seeing Dr. van der Kolk’s authoritative, nonfiction book—which I was prompted to get by my having read James Hilton’s Random Harvest recently, and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy previously—I suspect that multiple personality may be more common than I thought among persons diagnosed with PTSD.
Fortunately, judging by my own clinical experience, and as reported by Dr. van der Kolk in the case that he did diagnose multiple personality, psychotherapy may be successful.
1. Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York, Penguin Books, 2014.
Voices in the Head and Contact with Alternate Personalities
“The simplest case is one in which an alter personality emerges, identifies himself or herself, and proceeds to talk with the therapist…”
“Another form of contact is through inner vocalizations. The patient may ‘hear’ the alter personality speak as an inner voice within, often as one of the ‘voices’ that the patient has been hearing for years” (1, pp. 93-94).
Authors of books such as Chatter: The Voice in Our Head” (2) appear to be in total ignorance of the fact that voices may be voices of alternate personalities.
1. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.
2. Ethan Kross PhD. Chatter: The Voice in Our Head. New York, Crown, 2022.
Ethan Kross (post 2)
Ethan Kross says his father “was a walking contradiction” who was “always encouraging me to ‘go inside’” (1, p. xvii).
In past posts, I have frequently said that persons with multiple personality are typically self-contradictory. And the only situation in which I have ever used the phrase “go inside” was when I told a patient I’d been treating for multiple personality disorder to “go inside” to see if she still had any separate, unmerged, alternate personalities.
The above are two possible indications of multiple personality in Ethan Kross’s life, in addition to his hearing voices, which, in sane persons, may reflect alternate personalities.
“Chatter: The Voice in Our Head” by Ethan Kross (post 1)
“Our verbal stream of thought is so industrious that according to one study we internally talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking four thousand words per minute out loud…Sometimes this chatter takes the form of a rambling soliloquy; sometimes it’s a dialogue we have with ourselves…Sometimes it’s an…imagining of future events. Sometimes it’s a free-associative pinballing between negative feelings and ideas. Sometimes it’s a fixation on one specific unpleasant feeling or notion…” (1, p xxii).
In short, Kross’s “voice in our head” is not always or necessarily an intelligible voice, per se.
1. Ethan Kross. Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It matters, and How to Harness It. New York, Crown, 2022.
“In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing” by Elena Ferrante
This short book is a mixture of the novelist’s rambling, half-baked ideas about how her mind works.
“I don’t recall ever thinking, when I was young, that I was inhabited by an alien voice…I felt that someone was telling me what should be written and how. At times he was male, but invisible…I have to confess, I imagined becoming male yet at the same time remaining female… (1, p.24).
“I will tell you something that may seem contradictory. When I finished a story, I was pleased…and yet I felt that it wasn’t I who had written it… (1, p.28).
Ferrante quotes from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary: “I’m 20 people,” adding that “what writing captures doesn’t pass through the sieve of a singular I…The writer has no name” (1, pp. 30-32).
Much of the rest of this short, 111-page book talks about male vs. female issues in writing. Ferrante abandons the multiple personality issue of being 20 people, both male and female.
Search “Ferrante” for past posts.
1. Elena Ferrante. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York, Europa Editions, 2022.
What is a voice in your head?
A voice in your head is an auditory experience that originates in your own head, but does not seem to be merely your own thought. It differs from an attitude, because it is an auditory experience.
If a voice in your head argues with you, or in any other way appears to have a mind of its own, it may be the voice of an alternate personality, which, in most cases, is creative (like the character of a fiction writer) and not a mental illness.
Selection of Fiction Writers to Illustrate Multiple Personality Trait
Almost all the writers I discuss in this blog are either commercially successful or award-winning, because I don’t want you to think it is unusual or odd to find writers with multiple personality trait. In fact, it is more likely to be found in successful and award-winning writers, including 33 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, because the trait is an asset for fiction writing. I wonder if the people who award literary prizes know this.
33 Winners of Nobel Prize in Literature in Past Posts
1. Saul Bellow (1976)
2. Pearl Buck (1938)
3. J. M. Coetzee (2003)
4. Bob Dylan (2016)
5. T. S. Eliot (1948)
6. William Faulkner (1949)
7. William Golding (1983)
8. Knut Hamsun (1920)
9. Ernest Hemingway (1954)
10. Hermann Hesse (1946)
11. Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)
12. Rudyard Kipling (1907)
13. Selma Lagerlof (1909)
14. Doris Lessing (2007)
15. Naguib Mahfouz (1988)
16. Thomas Mann (1929)
17. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982)
18. Czeslaw Milosz (1980)
19. Patrick Modiano (2014)
20. Toni Morrison (1993)
21. Alice Munro (2013)
22. V. S. Naipaul (2001)
23. Eugene O’Neill (1936)
24. Orhan Pamuk (2006)
25. Harold Pinter (2005)
26. Luigi Pirandello (1934)
27. Jose Saramago (1998)
28. Jean-Paul Sartre (1964)
29. Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978)
30. John Steinbeck (1962)
31. Olga Tokarczuk (2018)
32. Patrick White (1973)
33. W. B. Yeats (1923)
“The Christie Affair” by Nina de Gramont
In this novelization of Agatha Christie’s famous 11-day disappearance, the narrator assumes Agatha hears multiple personality voices, an apparent reflection of the author’s own psychology.
“No, no, no, no.”
“Who hasn’t heard that word…rebelling against events unfolding against our dearest…wishes?” The narrator assumes Agatha was hearing these voices in regard to her imminent divorce from her husband…
“Agatha gave herself over to utter collapse — falling into…wounded pieces” (1, pp. 51-52).
Parts or “pieces” may be a euphemism for alternate personalities. Voices heard by sane persons may be voices of alternate personalities.
1. Nina de Gramont. The Christie Affair. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2022.
NOTE: The rest of the novel did not hold my interest.
FUGUES: a common symptom of multiple personality
“Multiple personality is the ultimate dissociative disorder… Patients do not, however, usually first present with complaints directly referable to dissociation. On the contrary, in many cases it requires several months or more before the patient will begin to discuss these symptoms with the therapist. Amnesia or ‘time loss’ is the single most common dissociative symptom in MPD (multiple personality disorder) patients. The NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) survey study found that the most commonly reported dissociative symptoms in MPD patients were as follows: amnesias (98%), fugue episodes (55%)” (1, p. 59)…
“Fugue-like experiences are common in MPD. They range from minifugues, in which the patient loses only brief amounts of time and travels short distances, to extensive fugues, in which the patient may ‘wake up’ in another state or country. In most cases, it is the host personality who ‘comes to’ and is baffled by the situation” (1, p. 77).
1. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.
Lee Child’s Jack Reacher “Said Nothing” (1, pp. 26,32,49,78,80)
In the subtitle of this blog, I ask readers to submit comments, but you, like Jack Reacher, have said nothing.
However, Reacher is sometimes quite talkative. So if he visited this blog, he might have many comments. You, too. Please, do.
1. Lee Child. No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Stories. New York, Dell, 2018.
“To Kill a Mockingbird”: Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” (1950’s) revealed racism and multiple personality behind her “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1960)
2018 (post 1)
Since Go Set a Watchman (mid-1950s) was written before, and was revised under editorial guidance into what became To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the former may be a less polished, but more authentic, reflection of the author.
In this novel, twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise returns home from New York City to Alabama to visit her aging father, Atticus, and also to renew her romantic relationship with Henry Clinton, who says to Jean Louise:
“You’re a Jekyll-and-Hyde character” (1, p. 47).
“In the years when he was away at the war and the University, she had turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being. He began dating her on her annual two-week visits home, and although she still moved like a thirteen-year-old boy and abjured most feminine adornment, he found something so intensely feminine about her that he fell in love” (1, p. 13).
“ ‘Want to drive?’ said Henry. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. Although she was a respectable driver, she hated to operate anything mechanical more complicated than a safety pin: folding lawn chairs were a source of profound irritation to her; she had never learned to ride a bicycle or use a typewriter” (1, p. 11).
At age eleven, when she got her first menstrual period, “It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had become one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing…and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess.” And so she felt “a cruel practical joke had been played upon her: she must now go into a world of femininity, a world she despised, could not comprehend…” (1, p. 116).
“Go Set a Watchman” by Harper Lee (post 2): Jean Louise’s multiple personality indicated by her dissociative fugue after finding father racist.
Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise is shocked, disillusioned, angered, and nauseated—she literally vomits—when she discovers that her idolized father, Atticus, is a racist.
However, in view of the obvious racist hierarchy of their community, and how freely Atticus and her other close relatives acknowledge their racist attitudes, I think that the only way Jean Louise could not have been aware of her family’s racism would have been for her to have compartmentalized awareness of it in an alternate personality. But that is just my opinion.
The main textual evidence for her multiple personality (aside from her duality, described in the previous post), is her dissociative fugue:
She thinks to herself, “Two solid hours and I didn’t know where I was.”
And when her Aunt asks her where she has been, she replies, “I—I don’t know” (1, pp. 120-121).
Search “fugue” and “dissociative fugue” for previous posts on this common symptom of multiple personality.
I would also interpret the episode at the end of the novel—when her uncle convinces her not to leave town and not to estrange herself from the family—as further evidence of multiple personality, because both his backhand to her mouth (p. 260) and his giving her whiskey appear to have changed her mind not by intimidation or intoxication, but by altering her state of consciousness (pp. 262, 269) and causing a switch to a more pliant personality.
1. Harper Lee. Go Set a Watchman. New York, Harper, 2015.
Multiple Personality: Not Crazy
Multiple Personality, called “Dissociative Identity” in the diagnostic manual, DSM-5 (1), is not a psychosis, because persons who have it can distinguish subjective and objective reality. But their subjective reality, like virtual reality, can feel more real than objective reality. So when a person seems crazy, but is not crazy, consider multiple personality.
1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.
Inconsistency in Novels: Writers are more than one writer
“Can a great book be badly written?…Yes, many pages in Faulkner’s most celebrated novels are atrociously written…” (1).
Also search “split inconsistent narrative.”
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/books/review/pankaj-mishra-by-the-book-interview.html
Multiple Personality begins with surprisingly widespread childhood trauma...
…and since childhood trauma has a wide range of severity, and children differ in their use of dissociative, split personality, defenses, multiple personality has a wide range, from multiple personality trait to multiple personality disorder.
Here is recent news on widespread childhood trauma:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/world/asia/new-zealand-child-sexual-abuse.html
Flagrant Lies as a symptom of multiple personality
One question to screen for multiple personality: Did you have a reputation as a liar when you were a child? A child may get that reputation when an alternate personality is seen doing things that the host personality later denies (due to a memory gap for the witnessed behavior).
Preposterous lies may also occur when the person is an adult if an alternate personality has a fixed belief. For example, an alter may believe he is a winner who can never lose and that, if he ever loses, it must be that he was cheated. His host personality may know very well that he lost, but his winner personality may take control and insist that he won.
Another example is an abuser personality who assaults his wife, but his loving personality denies that he would ever do such a thing, or that something must have come over him, because he really loves his wife and would never hurt her. And his loving personality may be so sincere that his wife forgives him.
Trump calls Putin “shrewd” (tricky): What is a Trickster? (post 1)
The trickster is a “boundary-crosser,” “shape shifter,” “the patron of thieves and the inventor of lying” (1).
1. Wikipedia. “Trickster.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster
Self-contradictory people (post 2): Hypocrites
Not all hypocrites have had multiple personality, but if I were looking for historical people whose self-contradictions might have reflected multiple personality, I would start with hypocrites (1, 2).
1. Wikipedia. “Hypocrisy.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy
2. Hypertexts. “Famous Hypocrites.”
http://www.thehypertexts.com/Famous%20Hypocrites%20Infamous.htm
Self-contradictory people: Which ones have multiple personality? (post 1)
Multiple personality is usually hidden behind a facade called the “host personality,” which is a consistent personality designed to deal with the public and most social situations. The two most common indications that alternate personalities are behind this facade are memory gaps and remarkable self-contradiction.
You will usually never know that a person has memory gaps unless you ask them.
You will usually never know that a person is remarkably self-contradictory unless you know enough about them and see them in different situations. For example, you may never discover alternate personalities who play the piano or write poems if you never see them in their private hours when they play the piano or write poems. And you may be puzzled when a person has contradictory political views or behavior at different times.
Once it is known that a person has memory gaps or remarkable self-contradiction, an expert interview can contact the person’s alternate personalities.
