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.

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Tuesday, February 21, 2023

“Homeland Elegies” a personal novel by Pulitzer Prize playwright Ayad Akhtar: Remarks may reflect author’s multiple personality trait


“For three weeks now, every morning at five thirty, I’d been waking up with dialogue running through my head, ready to write” (1, p. 127).


Comment: When the regular personality of some writers with multiple personality awakens from sleep, it may find writing that had been done by their alternate personalities while the regular personality had been asleep.


“…through my adolescence and early adulthood, the experience of seeing myself in a mirror took me aback…I saw a person I didn’t recognize…” (1, p. 194).


Comment: Persons with multiple personality may sometimes see alternate personalities when they look in a mirror. Search “mirror” for discussions in past posts.


“But I don’t choose my subjects... They choose me” (1, p. 219).


Comment: Either some subjects may be too interesting for the writer’s regular personality to ignore. Or, the writer’s alternate personalities may insist on certain subjects, and force these subjects on the regular personality, in which case, the regular personality, unaware of the alternate personalities, may interpret it as the subject’s insistence on being written.


1. Ayad Akhtar. Homeland Elegies (a novel). New York, Back Bay/Little, Brown, 2020.  

2. Wikipedia. “Ayad Akhtar.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayad_Akhtar

3. Wikipedia, “Homeland Elegies.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland_Elegies 

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