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.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Wednesday, March 23, 2022

“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.

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