“Martyr!” By Kaveh Akbar: Protagonist’s Unlabeled Multiple-Personality Issues in both Creative Writing and Intimacy

—“Cyrus was a good poet when he wrote, but he rarely actually wrote. Before getting sober, Cyrus didn’t write so much as he drank about writing, describing booze as essential to his process, ‘nearly sacramental’–he really said it like that—in the way it ‘opened his mind to the hidden voice’ beneath the mundane ‘argle-bargle of the every-day.’ Of course, when he drank, he rarely did anything else but drink. ‘First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you!’ Cyrus would announce proudly to a room, to a bar, forgetting from whom he’d lifted the line.”

“In sobriety, he endured long periods of writer’s block, or more accurately, writer’s ambivalence. Writer’s antipathy” (1, p. 10).

“Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality" (1, p. 271).

Comment: The “hidden voice” sounds like the voice of a creative-writing alternate personality who can take over whenever the regular personality is subdued by alcohol. Of course, writing will be impaired if the person gets too drunk.

—“Cyrus just ended up with people, their gender rarely figuring significantly into his interest” (1, p. 151).

Comment: “At least half of all MPD patents [also have] cross-gender alternate personalities” (2, p. 110).

1. Kaveh Akbar. Martyr!  New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

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

“Shred Sisters” by Betsy Lerner: NO Multiple Personality

Comment: The older sister probably has a Mood Disorder, not multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder), which is a dissociative disorder, not an affective or mood disorder.

1. Betsy Lerner. Shred Sisters. New York, Grove Press, 2024. 

“Ghosts” by Dolly Alderton: Max disappears after declaring his love for Nina—he “ghosts” her—Later, both may have features of multiple-personality, but the author does not label it

“There was daftness that I shared with Joe, and a seriousness that I shared with Max. Both were parts of me and both were true, but both seemed so in conflict with each opposing representative present. I hadn’t anticipated that this merging of people meant this merging of selves—it made me think anxiously about myself in a way that was unfamiliar (1, p. 102).

“Only one part of me remained in my skin while other Ninas detached and circulated in the room. There was one who was a spectator of the clawing and clinging; who couldn’t believe Max was inside my house and inside me…One Nina rejoiced, another one was scared. Another Nina examined him…(1, p. 244).

Comment: "Parts” of Nina and multiple Ninas are treated as a kind of psychology familiar to the author, suggesting the author may have multiple personality trait, but not think of it in such terms.

1. Dolly Alderton. Ghosts. New York, Vintage Books, 2022.

“The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum by Rebecca Loncraine: Biography Suggests Baum had Multiple-Personality Trait

“Sky Island was a follow-up to The Sea Fairies that came out in 1912. Trot and Cap’n Bill fly by magic umbrella to an island in the clouds. The island is more vaporous and less concrete than Baum’s other worlds, and the characters that inhabit it…aren’t particularly compelling. But the island enforces a dreadful form of punishment that is the most vivid thing about the story. Those who break the laws of Sky Island are butchered in half: “they stand you under a big knife, which drops and slices you in two…then they match half of you to another person who has likewise been sliced.” You have been “patched.” “It’s a terrible punishment"; the patched body doesn’t know which half is their original self and which isn’t. They are left divided, incoherent, working one half against the other. Baum’s storytelling mind had been splintered into numerous voices, which often wrote tales against one another—the gung-ho, chauvinistic fortune-hunting stories for boys were morally at odds with the Oz books, for instance. Perhaps Baum was aware of his divided, inconsistent nature” (1, p. 247). 

1. Rebecca Loncraine. The Real Wizard of Oz. New York, Gotham Books, 2009. 

“The Secrets of Midwives” by Sally Hepworth: Features of Multiple Personality (a.k.a. “dissociative identity")

— Memory Gaps related to alcohol (1, p. 274) or getting pregnant

— Metaphors of psychological self-dividedness; a character’s “parts”

— Compartmentalized Chapters and no omniscient point-of-view

Comment: Most people do not have prominent memory gaps, even with alcohol. They have facets, not “parts” (a euphemism for alternate personalities); and their regular personality has an omniscient point-of-view for its own stories.

1. Sally Hepworth. The Secrets of Midwives. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015.