"One Writer’s Beginnings” by Eudora Welty (post 1): Welty “hears” a “voice,” “certainly not my own,” has “always trusted this voice,” “the voice of the story or the poem itself”

“Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers—to read as listeners—and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don’t know. By now I don’t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

“My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice” (1. pp. 15-16).

Comment: Welty is neither crazy nor joking when she says that her guiding voice was not her own, but “the voice of the book or poem itself.”

Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison similarly said that her book, Jazz, literally wrote itself. Search “Who Wrote Toni Morrison’s Jazz?”

Of course, I interpret the dissociated consciousness of both Welty and Morrison as dissociative identity or multiple personality, the creative trait, not the mental disorder.

1. Eudora Welty. One Writer’s Beginnings. New York, Scribner, 1983/2020.

“The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard: “a work in progress will turn on you”

"I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better…

“This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated…As the work grows, it gets harder to control…You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it…” (1, p. 52).

“…One January day, working alone in that freezing borrowed cabin I used for a study on Puget Sound…I wrote one of the final passages of a short, difficult book…Mostly I shut my eyes. I have never been in so trancelike a state, and in fact I dislike, as romantic, the suggestion that any writer works in a peculiar state…” (1, p. 76).

Comment: She personifies a book being written as being able to turn on her. And how could a book get a will of its own? From alternate personalities involved in the process. And what might bring out alternate personalities? A “trancelike state,” which is psychological, not “romantic.”

1. Annie Dillard. The Writing Life. New York, Harper Perennial, 1989.

“Sybil” by Flora Rheta Schreiber: Was Sybil’s multiple personality iatrogenic, faked, or more elaborate?

In the last phase of Sybil’s curative psychotherapy by Dr. Wilbur, the alternate personalities whose self-image was younger than Sybil’s actual age were “age-progressed” up to Sybil’s actual age to facilitate their merger into one Sybil. This reminded me that Dr. Herbert Spiegel had once age-regressed Sybil in a demonstration of hypnotic phenomena.

Did Dr. Herbert Spiegel believe that Sybil’s multiple personality was not entirely genuine, because, in retrospect, he wondered if his age-regression of her had been partially responsible for it? Of course, if Sybil’s history of memory gaps had preceded Dr. Herbert Spiegel’s age-regression of her, then he did not cause her multiple personality.

Concluding comments: There are two reasons that faking multiple personality is rare, and a reason that the list of Sybil's personalities was probably incomplete. First, patients don’t like this diagnosis, because they feel it portrays them as a crazy freak. Second, it is very hard to remember all the characteristic nuances of each personality, and not be caught in making a mistake. In a movie, if the actor makes a mistake, they simply reshoot the scene. Third, as an added speculation, I would guess that Sybil, with an IQ of 170, had more than sixteen alternate personalities, but some were nameless and reticent.

1. Flora Rheta Schreiber. Sybil. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 1973/2009.

“Sybil” shows DSM-5 was written to make the diagnosis of multiple personality less likely

In Sybil (1), the nonfiction bestseller about a woman with multiple personality, the first thing the reader sees is NOT Sybil’s alternate personalities, but her problem with memory gaps. And in real life, that is the most common order in which the symptoms come to the clinician's attention: 1. Memory gaps, 2. Multiple personalities.

In contrast, in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, DSM-5, the Diagnostic Criteria for multiple personality are listed in the reverse order: A. Multiple Personalities, B. Memory Gaps (2, p. 292). Whereas, to repeat, in real life, as in “Sybil,” the clinician usually becomes aware of the alternate personalities only later, when looking to see why the person has a long history of memory gaps.

Of course, once the alternate personalities realize that their cover has been blown, and that hiding has become futile, they do start to look like multiple personalities. So, to further obscure the diagnosis, DSM-5 changed the name from “multiple personality disorder” to “dissociative identity disorder” (2).

Comment: The authors of DSM-5 rationalized what they did, but probably knew better.

1. Flora Rheta Schreiber. Sybil. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 1973/2009.

2. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5], Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013. 

“Dissociation” by Herbert Spiegel M.D., a strangely unavailable book, is a loose end in the story of “Sybil”

In “Sybil Exposed” by Debbie Nathan, Dr. Herbert Spiegel was one person who had seen Sybil and supposedly testified that he had evidence the case was fake. So for many years, I have occasionally tried to get the doctor’s book “Dissociation” to see what it had to say. At one point, it was offered for sale as a used book for $600.00, but I didn’t buy it. Since then it has been “out of print” and “unavailable.”

I consider it to be a strangely untold story as to how Dr. Herbert Spiegel could be against the legitimacy of multiple personality, while his son, Dr. David Spiegel, was the head of the group that wrote the section on multiple personality, and renamed it “dissociative identity disorder,” in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, the DSM.

“Dissociation” by Herbert Spiegel MD might have had nothing interesting to say about multiple personality and “Sybil,” but it is a loose end.

Is “Debbie Nathan” a Pseudonym?

Is her birth name "Deborah Ruth Nathan" (1)? 

Is “Debbie Nathan” an alternate personality or merely a personal preference?

1. https://prabook.com/web/debbie.nathan/494726

Debbie Nathan (1), author of “Sybil Exposed” is affiliated with National Center for Reason and Justice (2), defender of people accused of child abuse by people with multiple personality

Does this debunker’s affiliation mean "Sybil Exposed" had an ulterior motive?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Nathan

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Reason_and_Justice

“Sybil” by Flora Rheta Schreiber: Did Dr. Herbert Spiegel’s hypnotic age regressions on Sybil suggest alternate personalities of various ages to her?

I have just begun to read this nearly 500-page book. The Acknowledgments section includes “Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who did age regressions on Sybil and described her as ‘a brilliant hysteric’ ” (1, p. xix).

Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a psychiatrist who specialized in hypnosis, may have used Sybil as a hypnosis demonstration subject. And when he did “age regressions on Sybil,” he may have suggested that she experience herself at various ages, which may have inadvertently suggested alternate personalities of various ages.

Thus, if “a brilliant hysteric” could easily experience alternate personalities, the distinction between Dr. Spiegel’s diagnosis and Dr. Wilber’s diagnosis (multiple personality) may be less significant than they at first appear. And Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who denied Sybil had multiple personality, may have contributed to it.

1. Flora Rheta Schreiber. Sybil. NewYork, Grand Central Publishing, 1973/2009. 

Why People Try to Debunk Multiple Personality

Because when multiple personality replaced “possession,” it infringed on religion. Or because some people overvalue skepticism. Or since they don’t know how to diagnose multiple personality, they don’t know what people are talking about.

“Sybil”: What had a textbook on multiple personality said about it, and what has happened to the diagnosis?

I may go ahead and reread Sybil for its historical interest, but looking back in this blog, I see that I have already addressed its debunkers’ lack of credibility. And I have just done what they should have done, see what an authoritative textbook on multiple personality had said about it:

Sybil (1974) “is both detailed and accurate enough to serve as mandatory clinical reading for students of MPD” (1, p. 35).

Moreover, nearly fifty years later, the American Psychiatric Association’s official diagnostic manual, DSM-5, stands behind the diagnosis (renamed “dissociative identity disorder”) without reservation. The debunkers have been debunked.

1. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

Is a psychiatrist who strongly disbelieves in multiple personality qualified to have an opinion?

Since multiple personality patients may be very suggestible, a psychiatrist who strongly disbelieves in it is unqualified to have an opinion. An agnostic psychiatrist who has read about it is the most qualified.

Multiple Personality: Seemingly Endless Controversy

Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and past president of the American Psychiatric Association says multiple personality affects about 1 percent of the population, though “many of those people may have quite mild cases and do not experience problems from it and never come to clinical attention” (1). [consistent with my findings regarding fiction writers]

Other people say multiple personality is a fad encouraged by “the 1973 blockbuster book Sybil, about a woman with 16 personalities” (1). 

However, back in 1973, I was in the middle of my psychiatric residency training, and I don’t recall any impact from the book Sybil. Indeed, the diagnosis of multiple personality was never made by me or anyone else. What I do recall is that the hot topic in psychiatry of the 1970s was bipolar disorder and the prescription of lithium.

So out of curiosity, I plan to reread Sybil and see if it encourages or discourages the diagnosis of multiple personality (a.k.a. “dissociative identity disorder”).

As for John Steinbeck, East of Eden, and the meaning of the Nobel Prize in Literature, I have, at least for now, lost interest.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/us/politics/herschel-walker-mental-illness.html

Multiple Personality of One Politician is Finally Noticed by The New York Times 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/us/politics/herschel-walker-mental-illness.html

“East of Eden” (post 3) by John Steinbeck: Gratuitous Multiple Personality (author's mistaken idea of ordinary psychology, based on his own psychology)

After a minor character beats Cathy Ames almost to death, he hears the voices of two alternate personalities:

“Two complete and separate thoughts ran in his mind. One said, ‘Have to bury her, have to dig a hole and put her in it.’ And the other cried like a child, ‘I can’t stand it. I couldn’t bear to touch her’ ” (1, p. 97).

Comment: This unusual, split-personality psychological reaction is gratuitously attributed to an apparently minor character, only because, as a reflection of the author’s own psychology, the author assumed it to be ordinary psychology.

1. John Steinbeck. East of Eden. New York, Penguin Books, 1952/2016.

“East of Eden” (post 2) by John Steinbeck: “My god this can be a good book if I can only write it as I can hear it in my mind (1, p. 42)

Who was speaking the book in Steinbeck’s mind? His characters? But who put the book in their minds? Steinbeck? He admits he didn’t know what was in the mind of Cathy Ames, a pivotal character (2), for “You can’t go into the mind of a monster, because what happens there is completely foreign and might be gibberish” (1, p. 44).

East of Eden is a novel by American author and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck...The work was regarded by Steinbeck himself to be his magnum opus. Steinbeck stated "It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years," and "I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this" (3).

So who was speaking the book in Steinbeck’s mind? I would say a storytelling alternate personality, for who else could have been in there?

1. John Steinbeck. Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. London, Penguin Classics, 2001.

2. Wikipedia. “Cathy Ames.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_Ames

3. Wikipedia. “East of Eden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_of_Eden_(novel) 

Ideas Once Ignored—Asepsis in Surgery and Child Abuse—Now Conventional Wisdom

For most of history, surgeons did not wash their hands and sterilize their instruments (1), and society did not take child abuse seriously (2). But now the importance of these ideas is conventional wisdom.

An analogy to the idea “multiple personality trait” may seem far-fetched.

1. Wikipedia. “Asepsis.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asepsis

2. Wikipedia. “Child abuse.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse

“East of Eden” by John Steinbeck:  Character’s multiple-personality symptom reflects author’s multiple-personality symptoms

“I don’t know why I signed again [to go back into the army]. It was like somebody else doing it” (1, p. 52).

1. John Steinbeck. East of Eden. New York, Penguin Books, 1952/2016.

from May 22, 2019 post

“I confuse pretty easily,” John Steinbeck explained in a personal letter, so he had to “split” himself into two or three “entities” or “units”

“I confuse pretty easily I guess, although the Stockholm experience [of being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature] is capable of confusing anyone…

“But I have had to make a couple of drastic changes in the time past. Once I thought I could successfully divorce everything about myself from my work, I mean as far as the reader was concerned. I discovered that this, while it could be done if one had only written under a pseudonym, was impossible. So I had to split in two and establish two entities—one a public property and a trade mark. Behind that I could go on living a private life [see past posts on Henry James’s short story, “The Private Life”] just so long as I didn’t allow the two to mix. Now perhaps there must be three—the Nobel person, the trade mark and the private person. I don’t know how many of these splits are possible. As far as I am concerned the only important unit is the private one because out of that work comes and work is to me still not only the most important thing but the only important thing” (1, p. 922).

Why didn’t he just say that he liked his privacy? Because that wouldn’t convey what he meant, which was that he had more than one personality, and he didn’t want the public (which was to be dealt with by his host personality) to interfere with his writer personality, which he preferred to keep private.

Why did he talk in terms of “entities” and “units” rather than personalities? Either he didn’t think of it as multiple personality, per se, or he thought it prudent to use euphemisms when discussing this matter with his editor.

1. Jackson J. Benson. John Steinbeck, Writer [1984]. New York, Penguin Books, 1990. 

Memoirs of High-functioning Multiple Personality in Acting and Politics

Multiple personality (also known as “dissociative identity disorder”) is a serious mental illness when it causes clinically significant distress and dysfunction (1). However, after specific psychotherapy for it, and sometimes without therapy, a person with multiple personality may be quite high-functioning (2).

As discussed in this blog, the most common examples of high-functioning multiple personality that I know of are successful—including Nobel Prize-winning—fiction writers. I don’t know how common it is in politics.

Although multiple personality is usually hidden—except when a person is in crisis; or after diagnosis, for a demonstration; even from the person’s own, regular, “host” personality—it is occasionally hinted at (3) or even announced (4) in the title of a memoir.

1. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

2. Kluft, R. P. (1986). High-functioning multiple personality patients: Three cases. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 174(12), 722–726.

3. Sally Field. In Pieces: a memoir. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.

4. Herschel Walker with Gary Brozek and Charlene Maxfield. Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder.  Foreword by Dr. Jerry Mungadze. New York, Touchstone/Howard Simon & Schuster, 2009.

More evidence The New York Times is Clueless Regarding Multiple Personality

Two opinion essays in today’s print edition of The New York Times (1, 2) are about Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Georgia. Both essays neglect to mention that Walker has written and published a book about his having “dissociative identity disorder” (3), one of whose cardinal symptoms is memory gaps, but which may occur in persons who are high-functioning, such as successful fiction writers, and, perhaps, successful politicians.

1. Frank Bruni. “Why Herschel Walker May Win.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/16/opinion/warnock-herschel-walker-debate.html

2. Charles M. Blow. “Herschel Walker, Butcher of Language.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/15/opinion/walker-warnock-debate.html

3. Herschel Walker with Gary Brozek and Charlene Maxfield. Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder.  Foreword by Dr. Jerry Mungadze. New York, Touchstone/Howard Simon & Schuster, 2009.

CHALLENGE: Novelists commonly claim their major characters seem to have minds of their own. If that were ordinary imagination, most people could do it. Can you?

Cormac McCarthy’s new books are a reminder that he probably has multiple personality trait

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/books/cormac-mccarthy-passenger-stella-maris.html

Please search “Cormac McCarthy.”

Bob Dylan: His new book is a reminder he won the Nobel Prize in Literature and therefore probably has multiple personality trait

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/books/bob-dylan-book-excerpt.html

Please search “Bob Dylan” for past posts.

“Plum Island” by Nelson DeMille (post 5): John Corey, first-person narrating protagonist, suddenly refers to himself in the third person, which readers of Charles Dickens’s novel “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” were expected to recognize as multiple personality.

“I knew I was not rational anymore…John Corey had reverted to something best kept in the dark” [disembowelment of the bad guy] (1, p. 662).

Search “Charles Dickens” to see my first post, in which I discuss The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Added Oct. 14: How was disembowelment of the villain by the hero allowed to get in, and stay in, this novel? This may be an example of a writer's losing control of a character that had a mind of its own, which is the essential feature of an alternate personality.

      And how did a hero with a history of disemboweling a villain get rave reviews and become the hero of a whole series of successful novels, if reviewers and readers had actually read the whole book?

1. Nelson DeMille. Plum Island. NewYork, Grand Central Publishing, 1997/2017.

“Plum Island” by Nelson DeMille (post 4): More explicit than italics (see prior post), the protagonist says he hears a voice in his head (an alternate personality) and quotes it

“I could also hear a little voice in my head saying, ‘Beware of little men with big rifles.’ ” (1, p. 625).

Comment: As usual for this alternate personality, what it says is a wisecrack.

1. Nelson DeMille. Plum Island. NewYork, Grand Central Publishing, 1997/2017. 

“Plum Island” by Nelson DeMille (post 3): The protagonist’s line, quoted in post 2, which is not rendered in italics is out of character

Detective John Corey is known for his continual wisecracks. It is one of the characteristics that make him entertaining, and make him suitable to be one of this bestselling author’s recurring characters.

Of Corey’s two thoughts quoted in post 2, it is his thought rendered in italics that is more typical for him. His other, unfunny, bland, goody-goody thought, “My goodness,” which is not rendered in italics, is out of character for him. And this is the main reason most readers do not question the italics, which they think are used only to highlight one of his wisecracks.

If I am right that the italics indicates a contribution by one of the author’s alternate personalities, then this is an example of how a fiction writer’s multiple personality trait contributes to his success. 

“Plum Island” by Nelson DeMille (post 2): The reason some words in the protagonist’s head are rendered in italics, but other words are not

“I was at a point when I almost had to cross my legs lest Ms. Whitestone notice that Lord Pudly was stirring from his nap. Keep your pee-pee in the teepee” (1, p. 338).

“…She laughed. She wiggled her toes again and crossed her legs again. My goodness” (1, p 346).

Comment: “Keep your pee-pee in the teepee” is in italics, but “My goodness” is not, because the former is a remark by the protagonist’s alternate personality, but the latter is merely a thought of the protagonist’s regular, host personality, and the use of italics is the way that many authors make that distinction.

1. Nelson DeMille. Plum Island. NewYork, Grand Central Publishing, 1997/2017. 

“Plum Island” by Nelson DeMille (post 1): Why does first-person narrator, homicide detective John Corey, have an italics-rendered experience?

“Ping. Ping. There it was again. But what was it? Sometimes, if you don’t force it, it just comes back by itself” (1, p. 127).

Is he hearing a voice’s comment in his head or merely having an intuition, which tells him that something will prove to be a useful clue in his murder investigation?

But when he describes it as being able to “come back by itself,” he seems to give it a mind of its own, which is usually attributed to a person or an alternate personality.

Search “italics” for discussions of its use in other novels.

1. Nelson DeMille. Plum Island. NewYork, Grand central Publishing, 1997/2017.

“New York Times is Clueless”                                                      I have brought multiple personality trait in fiction writers to their attention, but they have not looked to see if it is true. Have you? Please do.

Colleen Hoover's Success: New York Times is Clueless

The Times article appears on front page of Monday, Oct. 10, 2022 print edition.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/books/colleen-hoover.html

Search “Hoover” for a clue in her work: multiple personality.

“Getting Lost” a memoir by Annie Ernaux (post 2): Italics may indicate the objective voice of an alternate personality, speaking in the Nobel Prize author’s head

“Sexually, things are still positive, but why kid myself? That’s all there is. As he got dressed in the study, gazing at his back, his buttocks, I was overcome by a sense of desolation, or rather deterioration, which leads to hatred, for having lost so much time since March, when my course on Robbe-Grillet ended, on a man who only sees me as a piece of ass and a well-known writer…(1, p. 172).

Comment: "That's all there is" is implied by "why kid myself?" And the rest of the paragraph elaborates her feelings and attitudes. So I deduce that the italics indicate something else, based on the way I have seen italics used by other writers.

Search “italics” for discussion in other writers’ works, where italics more clearly indicate the voice of an alternate personality.

1. Annie Ernaux. Getting Lost, a memoir. Translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer. New York, Seven Stories Press, 2001/2022.

Added same day: I finished it, but should not have. It is mostly a self-indulgent complaint about an extramarital affair that ended unhappily.

“Getting Lost” by Annie Ernaux (post 1): 2022 Nobel Prize winner’s books suggest she has multiple, hidden personalities

Annie Ernaux, since she is not a psychologist, has not conceptualized how her mind works, so I have set some of her self-contradictory statements—self-contradiction suggests multiple personality trait—side by side:

First, “I tell myself that this whole story is extremely dull and commonplace. A man and woman meet from time to time just to sleep together” (1, p. 106).

Second, in self-contradiction (suggestive of multiple personality), she had seen the affair as being so important that she had already published an autobiographical novel, “Simple Passion” (1, p. 8), about this very same affair with a younger married man.

Third, “I am conscious that I am publishing this journal [as a new book] because of an inner imperative—whose inner imperative, an alternate personality’s?—without concern for how S [her lover] might feel” (1, p. 9).

She also says, “My books have always been the truest manifestation of my personality, without my knowing it" (1, p. 105). Hidden parts of a person’s personality may be inner, alternate personalities.

And it is apparently common for things to happen to her without her remembering them, as indicated by her casual remark: “Since my flight home yesterday, I have tried to reconstruct events, but they tend to elude me, as if something had happened outside my consciousness” (1, p. 12). Memory gaps are suggestive of multiple personality.

Added Oct 9: Of course, with everything going on in the world, few people will concern themselves with the psychology of the woman who has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, especially since previous winners have had the same thing.

1. Annie Ernaux. Getting Lost. Translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer. New York, Seven Stories Press, 2001/2022.

Mark Twain, Stephen King, and Toni Morrison said writers don’t “create” characters, and so must learn to “prune” and “control” them

Most book reviewers, professors of literature, and judges for awarding literary prizes still think of literary characters as totally controlled by their authors. Why then, as I’ve quoted in past posts, have writers like Mark Twain said that authors never “create” characters? Why have bestselling authors like Stephen King said authors must “prune” their characters? And why has a Nobel Prize novelist like Toni Morrison said she could tell when characters had gotten away from their authors, who must learn to “control” them?

Most book reviewers, professors of literature, and judges for awarding literary prizes still think it is a joke when authors say that their major characters talk to them and seem to have minds of their own. I used to think they were joking, too. But I finally realized it is their creative process, not a joke. And it’s time that others realized it, too.

One implication is that judges for awarding literary prizes should think twice before awarding novels whose idiosyncrasies are not the author’s brilliance, but are, as Toni Morrison might say, the author’s failure to control her characters.

“Olive Kitteridge” (post 2) by Elizabeth Strout: talking to, and the interaction between, “inner selves” (alternate personalities)

This novel is a string of thirteen short stories. In the first one, “Pharmacy,” the pharmacist is Henry Kitteridge. Olive is his wife.

The focal relationship is between Henry and Denise, who works in Henry’s pharmacy. Henry has platonic, protective feelings for Denise, especially after she becomes a widow.

The most interesting psychological event is when Denise says to Henry, “I talk to you in my head all the time…Sorry.”

“For what?” [Henry asks].

“For talking to you in my head all the time.” [Denise replies.]

What is going on? According to the narrator, “their inner selves brushing up against the other” (1, pp. 24-25.)

Comment: When nonpsychotic people hear, and/or, talk to, people in their head, the people in their head are usually alternate personalities (inner selves). I would guess that the author had sometimes experienced her own inner selves (characters) (alternate personalities) as brushing up against each other.

1. Elizabeth Strout. Olive Kitteridge. New York, Random House Trade Paperback, 2008.

Added later same day: I have read the next story and looked in Wikipedia to see where the rest of the stories were going, and have decided I don't want to go there.

“Olive Kitteridge” (post 1) by Elizabeth Strout: At the end of the novel is a fictitious interview of Elizabeth Strout (ES) and Olive Kitteridge (OK)

The interview, which takes place “in a doughnut shop in Olive’s hometown of Crosby, Maine” (1, p. 276), ends as follows:

ES: But don’t you think there are maybe a lot of suicidal thoughts—or suicide attempts—for a small town like Crosby? Why do you think that is?

OK: You may be the writer, Elizabeth, but I think it’s a wacky question, and I’ll tell you something else—it’s none of your damn business. Good-bye, people. I have a garden to weed (1, p. 282).

Comment: That published interview, intentionally or not, was a virtual announcement by the author that she had multiple personality trait, with her protagonist as her main alternate personality. But most reviewers, probably including those who awarded this novel the Pulitzer Prize, didn’t get it.

1. Elizabeth Strout. Olive Kitteridge. New York, Random House Trade Paperback, 2008.

Puzzling people, even if high-functioning, may have undiagnosed dissociative identity; i.e., multiple personality

It may be undiagnosed, because they have never been asked relevant questions or they chose to evade diagnosis to avoid stigma.

It may not be formally diagnosable if it does not cause them clinically significant distress or dysfunction; or may even, for some purposes, such as fiction writing, be an asset.

Please search “puzzling people” for further discussion. 

Elizabeth Strout, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge, experienced her protagonist, Olive, like an alternate personality

“In an interview with The New Yorker magazine before the publication of Olive, Again—her sequel to Olive Kitteridge—Elizabeth Strout described her move to revisit Olive’s life as something initiated by Olive herself:

I never intended to return to Olive Kitteridge. I really thought I was done with her, and she with me. But a few years ago I was in a European city, alone for a weekend, and I went to a café, and she just showed up. That’s all I can say. She showed up with a force, the way she did the first time, and I could not ignore her. This time, she was nosing her car into the marina, and I saw it so clearly – felt her so clearly – that I thought, Well, I should go with this.

“The idea that characters can assume a life of their own and take on autonomy independent of their creators is explored by a team of psychologists, who found that 92% of surveyed novelists considered their characters, at least in part, to be “independent agents not directly under the author’s control.” It seems that Strout may also belong to this group of authors” (1).

Comment: In multiple personality, alternate personalities are imaginary persons who are subjectively experienced as if they had minds of their own. This author’s creative experience is an example of what I call “multiple personality trait,” present in about ninety percent of fiction writers, as found in the study of fifty novelists (2).

Added Oct 3: In contrast, in ordinary daydreaming or imagining, you have the sense that you, yourself are initiating it and doing it, that you are daydreaming or you are imagining; whereas, in multiple personality, it seems like someone or something else is initiating or doing it, which is how Elizabeth Strout described the experience, that Olive seemed to have independent agency.

   And since this is foreign to most people's experience, they think that when authors say such things that they are only speaking metaphorically or joking. But, to fiction writers, the process of fiction writing is not a joking matter. And they know it sounds crazy, so they say it as if it might be only a joke, so that if someone were to call them crazy, they could deny it.

1. Chloe Harrison & Marcello Giovanelli (2022) “Traits Don't Change, States of Mind Do”: Tracking Olive in Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, English Studies, 103:3, 428-446. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0013838X.2022.2033514?needAccess=true

2. Taylor, Marjorie, Sara D. Hodges, and Adèle Kohányi. “The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?” Imagination, Cognition and Personality 22, no. 4 (2002–2003): 361–380. https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/4/2521/files/2013/03/Taylor-Hodges-Kohanyi_2003-2b6wdel.pdf