“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.