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.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Friday, December 22, 2023

“Deacon King Kong” (post 1) by James McBride: 24-years after his memoir, The Color of Water, McBride remains conflicted with dissociated from his reflection in the mirror


“At age five, Baby Sportcoat [nickname of adult protagonist] crawled to a mirror and spit at his reflection (1, p. 16).


See posts in this blog on McBride’s memoir, The Color of Water (1996), in which I discuss his reported antagonism to differences with his reflection in the mirror, a textbook symptom of multiple personality. The thesis of this blog is that most novelists have a normal, creative version of multiple personality.


1. James McBride. Deacon King Kong. NewYork Riverhead Books, 2020.

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