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, March 14, 2023

“Pineapple Street” (post 1) by Jenny Jackson: Why Italics?


“They were standing so close she could have kissed him if she lurched fast enough. Oh my God, why would I lurch-kiss this person? She briefly hated her own brain” (1, p. 22).


Comment: Did she briefly hate her own brain, because her brain had had a socially inappropriate impulse to lurch-kiss a man? Or did she hate a voice in her head that had stopped her from doing it? If the latter, then the voice may have been the voice of a more inhibited and proper, alternate personality, and not just a metaphorical voice of reason or conscience.


I have seen many writers use italics to indicate a voice in the head (which, in a nonpsychotic person, may be the voice of an alternate personality). But I will need more evidence in this novel to support the idea that this particular author has multiple personality trait.


My position is that about 90% of novelists do have multiple personality trait, but about 10% of novelists may not. So I will keep reading.


1. Jenny Jackson. Pineapple Street. Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 2023. 

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