“Hangsaman” by Shirley Jackson: Foreword by Francine Prose, who wishes she had included this novel in her college literature course on “Strange Books”

“The everyday reality of Jackson’s teenage protagonist is repeatedly interrupted by bursts of awareness and alienation so complex that it would be reductive to call them ‘out of body’ moments” (Foreword, 1, p. x).

“Natalie Waite, who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen, lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions. For the past two years—since, in fact, she had turned around suddenly one bright morning and seen from the corner of her eye a person called Natalie, existing, charted, inescapably located on a spot of ground…and most obscurely alive—she had lived completely by herself, allowing not even her father access to the farther places of her mind. She visited strange countries, and the voices of their inhabitants were constantly in her ear…

“…Natalie was leaving for her first year in college a week after her brother went back to high school…sometimes it seemed a matter of minutes slipping by so swiftly that there would never be time to approach college with appropriate consideration, to form a workable personality to take along…(1, pp. 3-4).

Comment: Hearing voices in her head and creating adaptive (“workable”) personalities probably reflect the high-functioning multiple personality of a great author (Shirley Jackson), what I call “multiple personality trait” (not disorder).

Added 6/27/25: Search "Shirley Jackson" for major past posts.

1. Shirley Jackson. Hangsaman. New York, Penguin (Penguin Classics), 1951.