Colleen Hoover: Past Posts on her bestsellers “It Ends with Us” and “Verity,” highlighting multiple personality

Marital Abuse: Why doesn’t she just leave him?

In the past, when I read the above, cliché question, I often wondered if the abused wife had multiple personality: Maybe she had memory gaps for the episodes of abuse. Maybe she had an alternate personality that was originally, defensively, designed in childhood to appease abusers.

But since reading the novel It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover (1), I realize that it may be the husband who has multiple personality: He may know that he abuses his wife, if he sees her injuries, but he may not actually remember assaulting her if he has multiple personality’s memory gaps. Meanwhile, the wife may never think in terms of multiple personality, per se, because she sees her husband’s regular, loving personality as her true husband, whom she married, but his assaultive, alternate personality as only a temporary aberration triggered by alcohol or stress.

In the novel (1), the husband has multiple personality’s memory gaps, but does not get a correct diagnosis, because, apparently, the author did not know the diagnosis, and was not intentionally writing about multiple personality, per se.

Comment: Many works discussed in this blog—including classics and those written by winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature—have unintended or unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality, probably reflecting the multiple personality trait of most fiction writers.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016. 

“It Ends with Us”  by Colleen Hoover: Lily’s husband assaults her while he has a memory gap

Lily, the protagonist, has recently opened a flower shop and married Ryle, a neurosurgeon.  She has promised herself never to become a physically abused wife like her mother.  But after the second time he assaults her, Ryle confesses that when he was six years old, he accidentally shot his brother to death and “since that happened, there are things I can’t control.  I get angry.  I black out.  I’ve been in therapy since I was six years old.  But it is not my excuse.  It is my reality…I don’t remember the moment I pushed you [down the stairs]…You are my wife.  I’m supposed to be the one who protects you from the monsters.  I’m not supposed to be one” (1, p. 241).

Search “memory gap” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us”  by Colleen Hoover: Lily’s husband assaults her while he has a memory gap

Lily, the protagonist, has recently opened a flower shop and married Ryle, a neurosurgeon.  She has promised herself never to become a physically abused wife like her mother.  But after the second time he assaults her, Ryle confesses that when he was six years old, he accidentally shot his brother to death and “since that happened, there are things I can’t control.  I get angry.  I black out.  I’ve been in therapy since I was six years old.  But it is not my excuse.  It is my reality…I don’t remember the moment I pushed you [down the stairs]…You are my wife.  I’m supposed to be the one who protects you from the monsters.  I’m not supposed to be one” (1, p. 241).

Search “memory gap” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover: Author recalls her traumatic early childhood as partial basis for this novel

Note from the Author

“My earliest memory in life was from the age of two and a half years old…my father picked up our television and threw it at my mother, knocking her down.  She divorced him before I turned three…He was an alcoholic…In fact, he told me he had two knuckles replaced in his hand because he had hit her so hard, they broke against her skull.  My father regretted the way he treated my mother his entire life…and he said he would grow old and die still madly in love with her” (1, pp. 368-369).

As noted in my introduction to this blog, most adults with multiple personality have had childhood trauma, either as a victim or witness.  Search “childhood trauma” for past posts.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover: Author misunderstands her novel and possibly herself

“He knows what he’s done.  He’s [the nice] Ryle again” (1, p. 266).

Lily, the protagonist, recognizes that there are two Ryles, one that is angry and assaults her, and the other, a nice Ryle, whom she loves. But the author has forgotten that the angry Ryle blacks out (post 3), leaving the nice Ryle with a memory gap. That is, the nice Ryle knows what he’s done only indirectly, through circumstantial evidence (Lily’s injuries, etc.).

Thus, the author does not recognize that she has written a multiple personality scenario, with two Ryle personalities.

Search “unacknowledged multiple personality,” which is a multiple personality scenario that is unlabeled, and is probably a reflection of the author’s own psychology (search “multiple personality trait”).

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover: Dissociative (multiple personality) talk

“…too many pieces of me are invested in you now…” (1, p. 89).

“You make me want to be a different person…” (1, p. 93).

“I walked straight to the kitchen and I opened a drawer.  I grabbed the biggest knife I could find and…I don’t know how to explain it.  It was like I wasn’t even in my own body.  I could see myself walking across the kitchen with the knife in my hand…” (1, p. 154).

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“Verity” by Colleen Hoover: New York Times bestseller’s characters are writers with dissociative symptoms (multiple personality is a dissociative disorder)

Lowen and Verity are two female fiction writers.  Verity may or may not be a murderer, since she writes both a confession and a retraction.  It is also unclear whether Verity’s muteness after a car accident is brain damage, faking, or a posttraumatic, dissociative symptom (multiple personality is a dissociative disorder).

Lowen, the narrator, also has dissociative states of mind.  She has a history of sleepwalking since childhood.  One morning, she awoke “with a broken wrist and covered in blood” (1, p. 119).

The author has a sense of humor: "I was good at spewing bullshit.  It's why I became a writer" (1, p. 206).

1. Colleen Hoover. Verity. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.

“The novelist as voice hearer” by Patricia Waugh

“…Summoning voices with such intensity, living in the head for years at a time, would for most of us disorder our personalities, to say the least. But novelists control absorption or creative dissociation. They harness the power of the inner voice to create imaginary characters…The assumption that voice-hearing is inevitably a feature of psychiatric disorders, notably schizophrenia, is now changing…(1).

A condition that features inner voices (3, p. 94) and a very wide range of personal function has been known for many years. Many novelists appear to have multiple personality (also known as dissociative identity) but without having clinically significant distress and dysfunction from it, what I call “multiple personality trait” (not disorder).

1. Patricia Waugh. “The novelist as voice hearer.” Lancet, Dec. 05, 2015.

2. Wikipedia. “Patricia Waugh.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Waugh

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

2021 post

Survey of 181 Writers Finds They Have Multiple Personality Trait, But Survey Doesn’t Call It That or Even Mention Multiple Personality

John Foxwell, Ben Alderson-Day, Charles Fernyhough, Angela Woods.

‘I’ve learned to treat my characters as people’: Varieties of agency and interaction in Writers’ experiences of their Characters’ Voices.

Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 79, March 2020.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810019304155 

“A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/books/charles-dickens-a-christmas-carol-archives.html

Search “Christmas Carol” and "ghosts."

Unconscious Content: Thomas Hardy said, “No doubt there can be more in a book than the author consciously put there”

In Thomas Hardy’s 1912 Preface to Jude the Obscure, he said “no doubt there can be more in a book than the author consciously put there” (1, p. 4)

Comment: Memory gaps suggest multiple personality trait.

1. Rosemary Sumner. Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist. London, Macmillan Press LTD, 1981.

“Far from the Madding Crowd” by Thomas Hardy: Gratuitous Multiple Personality

History of childhood trauma

“…An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me” [Bathsheba] (1, p. 202).

Memory gap 

“Bathsheba” knelt beside the coffin…“she knew not how long she remained engaged thus. She forgot time, life, where she was, what she was doing” (1, p. 291).

Voice like “another woman”

“What have you to say as your reason?” [Bathsheba] asked, her bitter voice being strangely low—quite that of another woman now” ( 1, p. 293).

Women are “rum things”

“But knowing what rum things we women be…” (1, p. 354). Search “Casterbridge” regarding another of Hardy’s novels, in which a man changes personalities whenever he has rum.

Comment: “Gratuitous Multiple Personality” means symptoms or features of multiple personality that do not appear to be in the novel intentionally (to suggest multiple personality for plot or character development) and so may be in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait.

1. Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1874/2002.

Thomas Hardy is interested in a character with multiple personality disorder, but misdiagnoses it as alcoholism

“Alcoholism appears to be a particularly common presentation for male MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients” (1, p. 128).

“Unfortunately, many MPD patients would rather admit to the more socially acceptable drug or alcohol blackouts than admit that they do not really know why they ‘lose time’ ” (1, p. 61). Search "memory gaps."

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

past post from 2018

“The Mayor of Casterbridge” by Thomas Hardy: Did Michael Henchard sell his wife because he was drunk or because he had multiple personality disorder?

As husband, wife, and daughter walked along the country road, they were not very affectionate, but they were tired and hungry, he was between jobs, and they were low on money.

When they finally came to a town fair and got something to eat, each time Michael Henchard had rum added to his food, his demeanor changed: first he became serene, then jovial, then argumentative, and “at the fourth, the qualities signified by the shape of his face, the occasional clench of his mouth, and the fiery spark of his dark eye began to tell in his conduct; he was overbearing—even brilliantly quarrelsome” (1, p. 9).

Then, he offered to sell his wife and daughter.

Neither the crowd nor his wife could shrug off his behavior, because he seemed coherent and sincere. His wife had seen him act like this on a number of prior occasions, and she knew he did this only when he drank, but she was fed up.

The next morning, when Henchard awoke, his wife and daughter were gone. He found her wedding ring. And he found the money he’d been paid for them in his pocket. All this circumstantial evidence convinced him that his “dim memories…were not dreams” (1, p. 14).

He set out to find them, thinking, “she knows I am not in my senses when I do that!” (1, p. 15).

Comment

It appears that when Henchard drank, he switched to an alternate personality, who was angry with Henchard, and considered the woman to be Henchard’s wife, not his wife, anyway.

1. Thomas Hardy. The Mayor of Casterbridge [1886]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2001.

2. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayor_of_Casterbridge

“Getting Lost in Your Own Sense of Multiple Selves” (today's print edition title) with the Lensa AI app

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/style/lensa-ai-selfies.html 

Reading Fiction: Would you want to know how the writer thinks?

“Siddhartha” by Nobel Prize novelist Hermann Hesse

Since Siddhartha (1, 2) is not as recognizably about the author’s version of multiple personality as is another novel by Hesse that I read previously—search “Steppenwolf”—I will briefly focus only on Siddhartha’s most obvious symptom of multiple personality, hearing voices, which, in non-psychotic persons, are probably the voices of alternate personalities (search “voices”).

“He would only strive after whatever the inward voice commanded him, not to tarry anywhere but where the voice advised him” (1, pp. 47-48).

“He only noticed that the bright and clear inward voice, that had once awakened him and had always guided him in his finest hours, had become silent” (1, p. 78).

“Onwards, onwards, this is your path. He had heard this voice when he had left his home and chosen the life of the Samanas, and again when he had left the Samanas and gone to the Perfect One, and also when he had left him for the unknown” (1, p. 83).

1. Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha. Trans. Hilda Rosner. New York, Bantam Books, 1922/1951.

2. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhartha_(novel)

3. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_(novel)

Herschel Walker had multiple personality (1). “Donald Trump loved Herschel Walker” (2). Did they have more than celebrity in common?

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

2. Charles M. Blow. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/opinion/walker-georgia-senate-trump.html

“Elon Musk, ever a bundle of contradictions and inconsistencies” (1): Prototypical profile of someone with multiple personality trait

Comment: I’m not interested in Musk, haven’t studied his psychology, and haven’t formed an opinion, but I couldn’t help noting the prototypical characterization in today’s New York Times.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/business/media/elon-musk-politics-twitter.html

John le Carrè was David Cornwell:  Pseudonym suggests multiple personality

John le Carrè’s newly published letters. https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-private-spy-book-review-john-le-carre-letter-by-letter-11670605055

2016 past Post

“A Perfect Spy” by John le Carré: In first hundred pages, spy tells how unhappy childhood taught him the “art” of multiple personality.

This is John le Carré’s most autobiographical novel, especially in regard to his childhood.

The following scene takes place when the spy, the protagonist, was a schoolboy, after the latest episode of his chaotic childhood, when he was taking refuge in his school’s staff lavatory:

“He took out his penknife, opened it and held its big blade uppermost before his face in the mirror…He thought of cutting his throat…He pressed his cheek against the wood panelling…The knife was still in his hand. His eyes went hot and blurred, his ears sang. The divine voice inside him told him to look, and he saw the initials “KS-B” carved very deeply into the best panel…

“All afternoon he waited, confident nothing had happened. I didn’t do it. If I went back it wouldn’t be there…

“It was not until evening line-up that the full name of the Honorable Kenneth Sefton Boyd was called out…[Boyd was] Mystified. Mystified himself, [the protagonist] watched [Boyd] go [to get corporal punishment]…

“ ‘It had a hyphen,’ Sefton Boyd told [the protagonist] the next day. ‘Whoever did it [carved ‘KS-B’] gave us a hyphen when we haven’t got one. If I ever find the sod I’ll kill him.

“ ‘So will I,’ [the protagonist] promised loyally and meant every word. Like [his father, he] was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment” (1, pp. 97-98).

Comment

The protagonist had evidently carved the initials in the wood panelling: The initials were carved, and he was right there holding the knife. But he had no memory of doing it—he had a memory gap (search “memory gaps”)—and he did not notice the carving until a voice in his head told him to look.

That is, an alternate personality had carved the letters, and his regular personality had amnesia for what the alternate personality had done. And then a third personality, the voice, told the regular personality to look and see what the alternate personality had done.

“Learning to live on several planes at once” means having several different personalities. As previously discussed in this blog, the “alternate” in “alternate personality” is misleading, because all the personalities are conscious simultaneously, and they alternate only in regard to which one is out in front and is most in control of overt behavior at that moment, “the face you spoke from at that moment.”

It is noteworthy that, even after the protagonist’s regular personality sees, from circumstantial evidence, that he must have been the one who carved the initials in the wood panel, he does not really believe it. Why? Because remembering is believing. And the regular personality does not remember doing it. That is why you can give a person (the regular personality) all kinds of proof, even videotapes showing, that they have multiple personality, and they may still deny it.

In conclusion, this episode in the novel is a description of multiple personality, but since the terminology is not used, the author may not have understood it in those terms.

1. John le Carré. A Perfect Spy. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.

Voters May Not Have Believed Herschel Walker Had Multiple Personality

Herschel Walker, the candidate endorsed by former President Trump, has lost the election to be United States Senator from the State of Georgia. But none of the commentary on the election that I have seen mentions Walker’s multiple personality (1).

The public and news media may have thought that a person with real multiple personality would obviously and dramatically switch from one personality to another, as they may have seen in movies. However, as discussed in past posts, obvious switching usually occurs only in a crisis.

Comment: As far as I know, Walker, who had been an American football star, has not been a sore loser.

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

“The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts” by Maxine Hong Kingston: “No Name Woman” [Part 1]

“You must not tell anyone, my mother said, what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself…We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born” (1, beginning).

The author’s aunt was shunned, because she got pregnant by someone other than her husband. Refusing to address her by name was part of it. I don’t know why the author never uses the words “shun” or “shunning” (2).

The author highlights her aunt’s namelessness, which is a recurring issue in this blog, because multiple personality is the only realm I know where namelessness is relatively common; that is, it is not rare to meet alternate personalities that have no name. Search “nameless,” “namelessness,” and “nameless narrators” for past discussions.

1. Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York, Vintage International, 1976/1989.

2. Wikipedia. “Shunning.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning

Donald Trump and Herschel Walker: Has any prior president ever befriended someone who has published a book proclaiming his own multiple personality? 

Former President Trump has often been alleged to have a mental illness; most often, narcissistic personality. Those allegations might be dismissed as politically motivated. But it may not be politically motivated when someone publishes a book proclaiming his own mental illness (1), and a former president befriends him and endorses his candidacy for the United States Senate. What accounts for it?

First, if multiple personality can turn up in such a situation, it reinforces the fact that it is not as rare as most people think. Second, the fact that neither The New York Times nor Democrats have pounced on this coincidence supports my opinion that the Times and most others are willingly ignorant about multiple personality.

I guess Herschel Walker would have to be elected President of the United States for The New York Times and others to pay attention.

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

Why did former President Trump befriend Herschel Walker, a man with self-acknowledged dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality)?

Their initial connection was that Walker played football for a team in which Trump had a financial interest, but that does not explain the length and depth of their association, including Trump’s endorsement of Walker to be a United States Senator from Georgia.

I would guess that Walker, at least occasionally, showed some of multiple personality’s idiosyncrasies, but that Trump, for some reason, had been comfortable with them.

Of course, Walker probably tried to hide, and divert attention from, any such idiosyncrasies, as most successful multiples do. But since Walker published a book on his dissociative identity disorder, Trump must have been well aware of it. So the question remains as to whether Trump was comfortable with Walker, because he had similar idiosyncrasies.

Since I don’t know either man, I can’t answer the question. And, in any case, people with multiple personality can be very successful.

Added Dec. 7 st 9:13 a. m.: People with multiple personality trait—not the disorder—can be very successful. The difference is that "disorder" implies it is giving the person clinically significant distress and dysfunction. People with the disorder can be very successful if therapy, time, or situational changes cure them or reduce their distress and dysfunction to clinical insignificance.

Review why psychologists and psychiatrists fail to diagnose dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality): Search “mental status”

Skeptics May Fear Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality)

A few dozen multiples with multiple personality trait, not the disorder, have been Nobel Prize winners (search “Nobel Prize”). About one percent of the general public has the diagnosable disorder (1, p. 294), but they are usually harmless and inconspicuous. And multiples are only rarely murderers (2).

Nevertheless, since many characters in novels and movies who are seen as having multiple personality are weird or frightening; are rarely seen as any sort of superhero (3); and since the very idea of having a condition in which you don’t always know who you are or what you’ve done is frightening, most people are predisposed to fear multiple personality.

Therefore, I suspect that many skeptics of multiple personality, no matter how intellectual their stated reasons, are afraid of it.

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

2. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, M.D., et al. “Objective Documentation of Child Abuse and Dissociation in 12 Murderers With Dissociative Identity Disorder.” American Journal of Psychiatry., Issue 12, December 1997, Pages 1703-1710. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.154.12.1703 

3. Wikipedia. “Legion (Marvel Comics)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_(Marvel_Comics)

Allusion to Bible’s “Legion” in Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”

Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” is the story of a character named “Alonso Quixano” who has switched to an alternate personality, “Don Quixote,” but at the end switches back to his regular personality, “Alonso Quixano.”

In the course of Cervantes’ story, Don Quixote has an episode in which he bangs his head with stones like Legion does in the Bible (Mark 5:1-20).

I discussed all this previously in this blog in 2017: search “Don Quixote.”

Jesus Cures Legion: Gospel According To Mark, 5:1-20

“They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when he had come out of the boat, there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, who lived among the tombs; and no one could bind him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been bound with fetters and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the fetters he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out, and bruising himself with stones.

    “And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and worshiped him; and crying out with a loud voice, he said, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.’ For he had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’ And Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’ And he begged him eagerly not to send them out of the country.

    “Now a great herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; they begged him, ‘Send us to the swine, let us enter them.’ So he gave them leave. And the unclean spirits came out, and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.

    “The herdsmen fled, and told it in the city and the country. And people came to see what it was that happened. And they came to Jesus, and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the man who had had the legion; and they were afraid.

    “And those who had seen it told what had happened to the demoniac and the swine. And they began to beg Jesus to depart from their neighborhood.

    “And as he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed with demons begged him that he might be with him. But he refused and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.’

    “And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and all men marveled” (1, p. 1219).

1. The Oxford Annotated Bible, THE HOLY BIBLE, Revised Standard Version Containing The Old and New Testaments. Edited by Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York, Oxford University Press, 1962. 

“Conversations with Jim Harrison”: His mysterious fiction writing process

“While you’re working you totally enter the other person" (1, p. 114).

“…It was a nightmare for me because The Road Home is a voice novel, so the first two hundred pages are completely in the voice of the elderly John Wesley Northridge II, so I had to become seventy-one myself” (1, p. 146).

“…I don’t think I’ve ever written any fiction I haven’t thought about for three or four years…But I know the story before I sit down…I wrote Legends in nine days…but that’s the only time it ever happened like that…I couldn’t stop once I got started. It was truly like taking dictation…But that illusion of taking dictation from wherever always makes you wonder what’s going on, what can this be?…Suddenly the voice is in a perfectly energized marriage with the language and sensibility…I don’t know quite where those gifts come from. I’ve always felt that you shouldn’t over-inquire about the goose that lays the golden egg” (1, pp. 146-147).

“…And since I have one eye [the other eye was blinded in an accident]…I start more from my senses quite often than my mind and so I actually see what I’m going to do. For instance, my problem with the film version of “Legends” was that I’d already seen it in my mind, so there wasn’t quite enough dirt and blood rubbed into it. It wasn’t gritty enough. It got too pretty…” (1, p. 147).

Interviewer: Are there things that you don’t know about your characters?

Jim Harrison: Oh absolutely…I’m not all my characters. How could I be all two hundred or three hundred of them? These are people of their own…A lot of the novel-writing art is conscious, but it’s the emergence of the characters that are sometimes like seizures, even coming out of a dream…In another sense, what keeps me writing is the mystery of human personality…there’s really no accounting for a great deal of it…” (1, p. 150).

1. Robert DeMott (Editor). Conversations with Jim Harrison (Literary Conversations Series). Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2019.