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, November 27, 2023

“A Flicker in the Dark” (post 1) by Stacy Willingham: Protagonist’s gratuitous symptoms of multiple personality probably reflect the author’s

“I walk closer, the Xanax cloaking my mind into a forced calm. But still, something is nagging at me. Something is wrong. Something is different. I look around my yard: small, but well-kept…I think I catch a glimpse of movement behind a curtain from inside, but I shake my head, force myself to keep walking.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Chloe. Be real.

“My key is in the front door, already twisting, when I realize what’s wrong, what’s different.

“The porch light is off.

“The porch light I always, always leave on—even when I’m sleeping…” (1, p. 23).


Comment: Chloe is addressed by an italicized voice in her head, a typical symptom of a character with multiple personality, but since this novel has neither raised the issue of multiple personality nor labeled Chloe as having it, its only reason for being in this novel is that the author had probably experienced it as an aspect of her own, ordinary psychology.


“…the image I project out into the world isn’t actually real, but carefully crafted…I’m one small stumble away from shattering into a million pieces” [alternate personalities, when feeling most vulnerable or writing novels and creating characters] (1, pp. 38-39).


Comment: Of course, the author would have only the mentally well version, multiple personality trait, an asset for novelists.


Added Nov.29: I lost patience with the ending.


1. Stacy Willingham. A Flicker in the Dark. New York, Minotaur/St. Martin’s, 2021.

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