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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Sunday, April 23, 2023

“Wifey” (post 4) by Judy Blume: From Author’s Introduction to this, her first novel for adults


“I grew up in the Fifties [1950’s], with a mother whose expectations for me didn’t go beyond wanting me to be a good girl. She urged me to get a college degree in education in case, God forbid, I ever had to go to work…


“But by the mid seventies all the rules had changed. I was thirty-seven at the time…And so, in 1975 I left my marriage and set off with my children to find out what I’d missed.


“No, I’m not Sandy, although many of the details of her life come from mine…And I was never married to Norman but I knew plenty of guys like him…

 

“When I look at the book today, I can’t believe how fearless I was in the writing…Maybe I didn’t know enough then to be worried. Maybe I really didn’t care what anyone thought. I just remember this burning inside; this need to get Sandy’s story on paper. I was, after all, raised to be Sandy. I still identify with her…”


1. Judy Blume. Wifey. New York, Berkley Books, 1978/2005.

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