“Asymmetry” by Lisa Halliday: People keep visiting my 2018 post (below), with its quotation from this novel about a character’s memory gaps, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality

2018

“Asymmetry” by Lisa Halliday: Parts 1 and 2 differ, not only in people and culture, but in punctuation and memory; one character has memory gaps

Part I of this novel begins: “…what is the point of a book…that does not have any quotation marks?” (1, first paragraph), meaning not just that dialogue is interesting, but that punctuation clarifies.

One hundred and twenty-five pages later, Part 2 of this novel, with a new cast of characters, has plenty of dialogue. But there are no quotation marks. It intentionally obfuscates.

And whereas people in Part 1 seem to know what they’re doing, at least one character in Part 2 does not. In spite of keeping a journal, and with no drugs or alcohol involved, he says that time and events go missing (which I notice, because memory gaps may be a symptom of multiple personality):

“It’s as if I blacked out for entire weeks at a time…What don’t I remember? Lots. Contemplating the blackouts in their aggregate makes my breath come short…writing things down does not work” (1, pp. 137-138).

In an interview, the author has said that, in some ways, Part 2 is autobiographical (2). Are memory gaps an example?

Only halfway, I will keep reading.

1. Lisa Halliday. Asymmetry. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2018.

2. https://slate.com/culture/2018/11/lisa-halliday-discusses-her-novel-asymmetry.html