“The White Plague” (post 1) by Frank Herbert (author of “Dune”): Memory Gap for Terrorist Car-Bombing in Ireland

His wife had been decapitated and the twins killed. “Somewhere within him there existed an understanding of that scene…He knew he had seen what he had seen: the explosion, the death. Intellectual awareness argued the facts. I was standing at that window, I must have seen the blast. But the particulars lay behind a screen he could not penetrate. It lay frozen within him, demanding action lest the frozen thing thaw and obliterate him” (1, pp. 15-16).

Comment: Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of dissociative identity disorder (a.k.a. multiple personality disorder). It happens when the regular or “host” personality is not co-conscious with the alternate personality who has a particular memory. In the above, “Intellectual awareness” may be a logical alternate personality who tells the host personality what must have happened. Another alternate personality may be demanding action.

I don’t know whether the author will label this as an intentional case of multiple personality, or it is merely a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait.

Added same day: A person with more than one personality can both know and not know something or both remember and not remember something.

1. Frank Herbert. The White Plague. New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982.

2. Wikipedia. “Frank Herbert.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert 

“What Happened To The Bennetts” by Lisa Scottoline: Hearing Voices Help Father and Young Son Cope with Murder of Sister

“Do you think she’s a ghost [asks young son]? 

“Well, I [Father] believe she’s always with us. Her soul is with us.

“I believe that, too. I talk to her, Dad. Is that weird?

“No, not at all. I talk to her, too, and I hear her voice…(1, p. 125).

“I [Father] sat at the laptop in the kitchen, on autopilot…I had been online for hours, scrolling mindlessly. The house was quiet. I felt raw, exhausted, and broken, alone with my thoughts.

“What can you do about it?” (1, p. 169).

Comment: Since ordinary thoughts do not hold conversations with the regular self or address the regular self in the third person—but alternate personalities may do so—the above suggests that a mild form of multiple personality is helping this father and son cope with a death in the family.

But since no character has been labeled as having multiple personality, the above may reflect the author’s multiple personality trait.

1. Lisa Scottoline. What Happened To The Bennetts. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2022. 

“Louder Than Hunger” by John Schu: “In achingly honest free verse, the author takes readers inside the life of a boy with an eating disorder and a loud voice in his head” (front flap)

—Who is this narrator?

“I’m hoping by writing my name (Jake) over and over, I’ll figure out who I am” (1, pp. 5-6).

Comment: How could he know everyone calls him “Jake,” but not be sure who he is? Perhaps the narrator is really a nameless alternate personality.

He says, “I look at a photo of Emily Dickinson taped to my desk. I know her poem by heart. “I’m nobody! Who are you…Are you—Nobody—too? (1, p. 8).

—Mirror 

“In the mirror is an ugly, grotesque blob staring back at me, telling me I’m a waste of space, pathetic, worthless. Is that really me? I usually avoid mirrors” (1, p. 50).

Comment:“MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror…In some instances, these alterations of perception of self are so disturbing that the individuals may phobically avoid mirrors (2, p. 62).

—Title, Louder Than Hunger

Comment: The title of this book refers to the loud, coherent voice that the protagonist hears in his head. This title, in and of itself, suggests that this is a multiple personality story: “Almost always, the voices (in MPD) are described as being “heard” within the patient’s head or experienced as ‘loud thoughts.’ They are usually heard clearly and distinctly. These features can help to distinguish them from the auditory hallucinations found in schizophrenic patients, which are more often (but certainly not always) experienced as emanating from outside the person and are often heard indistinctly. The hallucinatory voices of MPD patients often carry on lengthy discussions that seem coherent and logical to the patient” (2, p. 62).

Like novelists conversing with their characters.

1. John Schu. Louder Than Hunger. Somerville Massachusetts, Candlewick Press, 2024.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“My Dark Vanessa” by Kate Elizabeth Russell: Non-Sequential Chapters Suggest Author’s Multiple Personality Trait

The chapters of this novel are not chronological. They skip back and forth through the years, as if the author’s mind had different compartments for different parts of the story. And since compartmentalization (into alternate personalities) is the basic format of a mind with multiple personality, non-sequential chapters might suggest an author’s multiple personality trait. 

—Incidental Signs of Split (Multiple) Personality:

“The question makes me split off from myself, like my body stays beside his while my brain retreats to the seminar table” (1, p. 44).

“I can’t focus on what is happening, my mind so far away it might as well belong to someone else” [an alternate personality] (1, p. 82).

“He did that to you, now you do this to him. You can handle a few minutes of this” (1, p. 101). (Protagonist hears an italicized voice of an alternate personality in her head.)

“Even when I try to recall it now, I can’t quite remember” (1, p. 137). (A multiple personality memory gap.)

“It doesn’t feel like my hand moving the mouse around the screen. Someone else [an alternate personality] guides it…” (1, p. 143).

1. Kate Elizabeth Russell. My Dark Vanessa. New York, William Morrow/HarperCollins. 2020. 

“A Little Life” (post 9) by Hanya Yanagihara: Misdiagnosis and Incompetent Treatment

Comment: I lost patience with this novel [when I gathered that] neither its author nor its reviewers understood that Jude had dissociative identity disorder (see posts 1-8).

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016. 

Added March 17: Jude's suicide [probably] results from incompetent treatment of his dissociative identity disorder (a.k.a. multiple personality disorder).

“A Little Life” (post 8) by Hanya Yanagihara: Try to Diagnose and Fix Jude or be Neglectful and Immoral

“The person he thought he knew turned out to be, in some ways, not the person before him, and it had taken him time to figure out how many facets he had yet to see: it was as if the shape he had all along thought was a pentagram was in reality a dodecahedron [twelve faces], many sided and many fractaled [infinitely complex] and much more complicated to measure…When he had promised himself that he wouldn’t try to repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not only neglectful but immoral” (1, p. 586).

Comment: Will the author ever make the multiple personality diagnosis?

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

“A Little Life” (post 7) by Hanya Yanagihara: When you look at people with undiagnosed multiple personality, you see only a fraction of who they are

“…it made me remember that what I knew of him [Jude] was just a tiny fraction of who he was” (1, p. 417).

Comment: In spite of the ample evidence of Jude’s multiple personality cited in posts 1-6, the author had not recognized its presence in her own central character. Why? Probably because she had intended to write a serious, literary novel, and had thought of multiple personality as a cheap gimmick found only in commercial novels, which is disproved by this, her own, literary novel.

I will see if the rest of this novel shows more insight into its central character.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016. 

“A Little Life” (post 6) by Hanya Yanagihara: Not labelled as such by the author, italicized voices of alternate personalities converse

“Don’t do it, don’t fool yourself, no matter what you tell yourself, you know what you are, says one voice.

“Take a chance, says the other voice. You’re lonely. You have to try. This is the voice he always ignores.

“This may never happen again, the voice adds, and this stops him.

“It will end badly, says the first voice, and then both voices fall silent, waiting to see what he will do.

“He doesn’t know what to do; he doesn’t know what will happen. He has to find out. Everything he has learned tells him to leave; everything he has wished for tells him to stay. Be brave, he tells himself.  Brave for once" (1, pp. 357-358).

Comment: Judging by Wikipedia (2), neither the author nor reviewers of this novel recognized passages like the above as conversation among alternate personalities in multiple personality, which is probably in the novel as a reflection of the multiple personality trait in most great novelists, a theme of this blog.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

2. Wikipedia. “A Little Life.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Life 

“A Little Life” (post 5) by Hanya Yanagihara: Italicized voices in Jude’s head argue with each other

"It’s all within the law, he would argue with the Harold-in-his head.

“Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should, Harold-in-his-head would shoot back at him” (1, p. 276).

Comment: Ordinary thoughts are not italicized, but voices of alternate personalities are italicized. So the above is an argument between one of Jude’s Jude-identified alternate personalities and one of Jude’s Harold-identified alternate personalities. 

What goes on in the mind of a person with multiple personality may be quite complicated, too complicated to handle by the mind of a person who is psychotic, which is one reason that multiple personality is not classified as a psychosis.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016. 

“A Little Life” (post 4) by Hanya Yanagihara: Jude has memory gaps, the foremost diagnostic symptom for multiple personality

“He will (though he won’t be able to remember how later) somehow work himself into a standing position, get himself out of the tub, take some aspirin, go to work…My life, he will think, my life. But he won’t be able to think beyond this…as he slips into that other world that he visits when he is in such pain, that world he knows is never far from his own but that he can never remember after: My life” (1, pp. 176-177).

“The…most commonly reported dissociative symptom in MPD (a.k.a. “dissociative identity disorder”) was amnesias (98%) (a.k.a. “memory gaps”)…(2, p. 59).

Comment: Since the author has not explicitly mentioned the diagnosis—“multiple personality” or “dissociative identity disorder”—I can’t credit the author with giving it to her main character knowingly. Perhaps the author has high-functioning multiple personality trait.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. 

“A Little Life” (post 3) by Hanya Yanagihara: Jude Argues with Himself, a Sign of Multiple Personality

“…increasingly he [Jude] was certain Willem [a friend] knew something. (Knows what? he’d [an alternate personality would]  argue with himself…You’re just looking for a reason to tell him, and then what will he think of you? Be smart. Say nothing. Have some self-control)” (1, p. 108).

Textbook: “Many host [regular] personalities already have some form of communication with the other personalties when they present for treatment, although they are usually not aware of what is actually happening. The experience of the host personality is that he or she gets into arguments with himself or herself" (2, p. 82).

Comment: Ambivalence, per se, would assume the presence of only one person who has mixed feelings; whereas arguing, per se, would assume the presence of two people, the regular personality and an alternate personality, which is experienced as if it were another person. Therefore, arguing with yourself (as opposed to ordinary ambivalence) is a sign of multiple personality.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.