“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.