Novelist Patricia Highsmith: Transgender and/or Multiple Personality

Note: “At least half of all MPD patients have cross-gender alternate personalities” (3, p. 110).

Added same day: Therefore, if you are not experienced and adept at interviewing persons who have multiple personality, you may be unable to distinguish between transgender and multiple personality.

“I am a…boy in a girl’s body” (1, p. 46).

“When she came in contact with people, she realized she split herself into many different, false, identities…” (1, p. 119).

“Highsmith revealed that in order to write she often deliberately thought herself into a different frame of mind, by pretending she was not herself…‘I suppose it’s a measure of how professional one is, how quickly one can do this’" (1, p. 123).

“I am troubled by a sense of being several people…” (1, p. 134).

“The Talented Mr Ripley…was written at speed in 1954, taking only six months. ‘It felt like Ripley was writing it,’ she said later, ‘it just came out’…The story is a dark reworking of Henry James’ The Ambassadors (1, p. 191-192)…‘I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing’”  (1, p. 199).

1. Andrew Wilson. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. New York, Bloomsbury, 2003.

2. Wikipedia. “Patricia Highsmith.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Highsmith

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