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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Monday, August 7, 2023

“Twisted Love” (post 1) by Ana Huang: Opening May Set Stage for Multiple Personality


“Alex’s childhood had been even worse than ours" (1, p. 7): Multiple personality is typically a psychological defense against childhood trauma.


“I wasn’t a protector; I was a destroyer” (1, p. 20): Protectors and persecutors are two common types of alternate personalities.


“Part of me thought…, but another part…" (1, p. 31): Persons with undiagnosed multiple personality often refer to their alternate personalities as “parts.”


“I have a superior memory” (1, p. 34): In multiple personality, the regular or “host” personality often has memory gaps. But other personalities may have exceptionally good memory.


“…my memories were so twisted I remembered nothing before the age of nine, when the most horrible events of my life had occurred” (1, p. 39).


Comment: I don’t know if there will be any explicit multiple personality in this or subsequent novels in Ana Huang’s Twisted series. If there will be, then Book One has set the stage. If there won’t be, then I would call the above “gratuitous symptoms of multiple personality,” which probably reflect the author’s multiple-personality trait, a common asset of successful fiction writers.


1. Ana Huang. Twisted Love (Twisted Series, Book One). Naperville, Illinois, Bloom Books, 2022. 

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