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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Tuesday, September 13, 2022

“Nonbinary” (post 5): Maybe the question is not “What am I?” but “Who and how many?”


“Is my identity a destination waiting at the end of a long journey?…Each time I made a new discovery about myself, I breathed a sigh of relief because it felt as though I was finally ‘there.’ Each time, without fail, I would get to a point where I was questioning my identity again.


“When we are asked, ‘What are you?,’ the only true answer is ‘This is what I am right now.’ Everything I’ve been through and all the identities I’ve embraced have been true to me…Right now, I am a writer who is polyamorous and a parent who is trans and nonbinary. Right now I can simultaneously feel good about the work I’ve done to discover and honor my authentic self and also acknowledge that I’m not nearly finished with the job of answering the question ‘What am I?’ ” ( 1, p. 98).


1. Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane (Editors). Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity. New York, Columbia University Press, 2019. 

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