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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Saturday, March 25, 2023

“Things We Never Got Over” (post 3) by Lucy Score: Protagonist Naomi Witt describes another character as her “voice of reason”


She says “Stefan Liao was the world’s perfect man. He was smart, funny, thoughtful, outrageously generous, and so pretty it hurt to look directly at him…And somehow I’d gotten lucky enough to land him as a best friend. He swept me up in his arms and twirled me around…(1, p. 171).


“[Stef was] My voice of reason best friend. No judgments. No second guessing. Just unconditional love and support, and the occasional truth bomb. He was one in a billion” (1, p. 175).


Comment: Beautiful heterosexual women may have gay male friends and confidants. But I don’t recall reading any other novel in which one character referred to another character as a “voice” of any kind. 


“Voice of reason” may be merely a metaphor for saying that Stefan had good judgment. But I think that fiction writers tend to use the word “voice” to refer to the voices in their head of narrator, character or mentor, alternate personalities. And so I wonder if this author hears a gay male voice of reason. But I don’t know this author and she would probably say my guess is ridiculous.


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

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