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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Saturday, June 18, 2022

Literary Review Standards: The case of the protagonist who forgot how to drive

Rose loved to drive, had to drive, because “I had found a tightness in my chest. Some nights it woke me up, and I would lie there, taking shallow breaths…The only time it seemed to go away was when I was driving” (1, p. 31).


When she found out she was pregnant, she decided not to tell her husband or her mother or where she was going, but simply planned to drive far away, out of state, to a home for unwed mothers.


The puzzling inconsistency of her driving skills is notable: “After I left the doctor’s office, after he had shaken my hand and said congratulations, I drove the car out onto the freeway and couldn’t remember how to drive. I pulled over into the breakdown lane and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel…I kept thinking, someone is going to open the passenger side door and tell me what to do…but no one came” (1, pp. 33-34).


Comment: In multiple personality, alternate personalities may differ in their skills. One personality may know how to drive, but another personality may not. Did the author know this? Had she had puzzling inconsistencies in her own skills? If a review of this novel (2) fails to note the protagonist’s definite symptom of multiple personality, the review is inadequate.


1. Ann Patchett. The Patron Saint of Liars [1992]. New York, Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

2. Alice McDermott. “A Sense of the Miraculous.” New York Times. July 26, 1992. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/26/books/a-sense-of-the-miraculous.html

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