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