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, September 19, 2023

“Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” (post 1) by Anne Tyler: With whom or what would the protagonist or author converse inside her head?

“Dance? Oh, I don’t think so, she said inside her head. I’m in charge of this whole affair, you see, and all I’d have to do is turn my back one instant for the party to go to pieces, just fall into little pieces…” (1, p. 18).


Comment: If one reads the above fast and superficially, it may seem to merely repeat the protagonist’s oft-repeated complaint that her husband, who travels for business, is almost never home. But with what kind of entities—“inside her head”—other than her creative alternate personalities, would she be conversing?


The author’s creative process, as with most great novelists, probably involves multiple personality trait, which requires constant management and coordination of her alternate personalities (characters, editors, and storytellers).


1. Anne Tyler. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant [1982]. New York, Vintage Books, 2017.

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