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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Sunday, October 9, 2022

“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.

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