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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Thursday, March 23, 2023

“Things We Never Got Over” (post 1) by Lucy Score: Do Bestselling Romance Novelists Have Multiple Personality Trait?


When I started this blog, I read mostly literary classics. And when I found that almost all of them contained unintentional symptoms of multiple personality, I initially thought that this might be what made literary novels literary, and that “multiple personality trait” might be what distinguished serious, literary novelists from commercial, genre novelists. But I eventually realized that all kinds of fiction, and most fiction writers, share this psychology.


The premise of Things We Never Got Over by Lucy Score (1) is this: Naomi’s obnoxious, identical twin sister, Tina, has run off, leaving Naomi to care for a niece she had never met nor even known existed.


Things We Never Got Over is 552 pages long, so I hope it will have something relevant to this blog. But since identical twins are a symbol for alternate personalities—objectively, though not in their self-image and mirror images, which may differ dramatically, all personalities of a person with multiple personality have the same body—I am hopeful.


1. Lucy Score. Things We Never Got Over. Naperville Illinois, Bloom Books, 2022.

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