“My Friends” (post 1) by Fredrik Backman: Teenage Protagonist Louisa’s Two Personalities Share Her Brain

“Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human…the only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans…

“…sometimes Louisa is a genius, but sometimes she isn’t a genius, and the problem is that the genius and the non-genius share a brain. But the plan? Perfect…” (1, p. 1).

Comment: Fredrik Backman introduces his latest novel with a humorous statement that his semi-genius, teenage protagonist has a split personality.

1. Fredrik Backman. My Friends. Trans. Neil Smith. New York, Atria Books, 2025. 

“Broken Country” by Clare Leslie Hall: Author’s Creative Mind Since Childhood

“How quick I have become used to my double life” (1, p. 195). “I try to fit myself back into my duplicitous life” (1, p. 197).

“As a child I’d become so absorbed in my favorite stories, the characters sometimes felt more vivid to me than my friends. Even as an adult, I could still lose myself in fictional worlds, feeling the wrench when I was forced to return to real life” (1, p. 61).

Comment: The novel is divided into five parts, beginning in 1968 (1, p. 1). Why isn’t it organized into one continuous story with an omniscient narrator? In the context of all my past posts, I interpret the above as reflecting the mind of a successful novelist who has a creative version of “multiple personality trait” since childhood.

1. Clare Leslie Hall. Broken Country. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2025. 

“Magic Hour” by Kristin Hannah: Author thinks in terms of Multiple Personality

“She needed to force a confrontation between the two Alices—the child lost in the woods and the girl who’d been returned to the world. These two halves needed to integrate into a single personality or Alice’s future would be at risk” (1, p. 174).

Comment: In this blog, search “The Nightingale”  and “The Women” for past posts on this author.

1. Kristen Hannah. Magic Hour. New York, Ballantine Books, 2006/2023.

“The Vegetarian” by Han Kang, winner of both Booker and Nobel Prizes

Introduction: This very short novel didn’t hold my interest, so I’ll just highlight a few, possibly dissociative disorder-related, facts and symptoms. Her husband introduces the title character on the first page of text, thus:

“The passive personality of this woman in whom I could detect neither freshness nor charm, or anything especially refined, suited me down to the ground” (1, p.10)…“The paunch that started appearing in my mid-twenties, my skinny legs and forearms that steadfastly refused to bulk up in spite of my best efforts, the inferiority complex I used to have about the size of my penis—I could rest assured that I wouldn’t have to fret about such things on her account…And so it was only natural that I would marry the most run-of-the-mill woman in the world…(1, p. 10).

“She was a woman of few words. It was rare for her to demand anything of me…More than likely she would spend the time reading, which was practically her only hobby…reading books that looked so dull I couldn’t even bring myself to so much as look inside the covers…”

“Her face was turned away from me, and she was standing there so unnaturally still it was almost as if there was someone I couldn’t see—some kind of ghost standing near the fridge. What was going on? If she couldn’t hear me, then perhaps that meant she was sleepwalking. When I put my hand on her shoulder I was surprised by her complete lack of reaction…She’d simply ignored me. (1, p 13).

    “I had a dream.”

    Her voice was surprisingly clear.

   She kept putting parcels of meat into the rubbish bag, seemingly no more aware of my existence than she had been last night.

   “I had a dream.”

   Those words again.

“The very idea that there should be this side to her.

“So you’re saying that from now on, there’ll be no rest in the house?”

“Until when?”

“I suppose…forever.” (1, p. 19).

“When a person undergoes such a drastic transformation, there’s simply nothing anyone else can do but sit back and let them get on with it” (1, 21).

 “According to my wife, he (her Father-in-law) had whipped her over the calves until she was eighteen years old.” (1. p. 35).

“I become a different person, a different person rises up inside me, devours me, those hours…” (1, p.38).

Comment: Though I’ve noted some dissociative symptoms and a history of abuse at a younger age, I can’t be more definitive, because my attention was not even held to the end. Judging by the literary prizes, that is probably my fault.

1. Han Kang. The Vegetarian. Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith. New York, Hogarth, 2007/2015/2018., pp.185.

 

“The Forrest for the Trees: an Editor’s Advice to Writers” (1, 2) by Betsy Lerner

“Most writers appear neurotic; the truth is, we don’t know the half of it” (1, p. 98).

“Every editor becomes a de facto therapist, whether or not he engages in the therapeutic as well as the editorial process” (1, p. 108).

1. Betsy Lerner. The Forrest for the Trees (an Editor’s Advice to Writers). New York, Riverside, 2000/2010.

2. Publisher’s Weekly Review. 

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers

Betsy Lerner. Riverhead Books, (284pp) ISBN 978-1-57322-152-8

In a quirky, informal, engaging guide for aspiring writers, Lerner, a literary agent who was most recently executive editor at Doubleday, assumes the posture of the writer's sympathetic friend, coach and psychotherapist all rolled into one. She views writers as neurotic by definition--isolated, a breed apart, prone to phobias and ritualized behaviors, often seething with bottled-up envy, desire for vindication or revenge, obsessed with sex and money (""In other words, the stuff of great books,"" she quips). Instead of worrying about fame or rejection, or seeking vicarious parental approval through publication, blocked writers and those who can't figure out what they should be writing ought to pursue their obsessions, she urges, mindful that many of the best books are born of anger, pain or the struggle for self-definition. Lerner candidly draws on her experience working both sides of the fence, as poet and teacher of writing workshops as well as editor and agent. She offers hard-nosed advice on topics often overlooked, such as the dynamics of author/editor and author/agent relations; struggles against the temptations of alcohol and drugs; the testing of book titles for marketability; acrimony over jacket art. While a lot of her straight talk has a familiar ring, readers will glean practical nuggets. The book's real value, however, lies in compelling the ambivalent writer to confront his or her inner dreams, demons and strengths, and Lerner illuminates this task with a nonstop barrage of anecdotes and apt observations on writing drawn from Dickens, Orwell, Whitman, Updike, Nabokov, Vidal, Mailer, Grisham, Sontag, Philip Roth and many more. (Apr.)

“Fox” (post 1) a novel by Joyce Carol Oates: Engaging Vocabulary

Front Flap (1):

“beguiles”

“hypnotic”

“magnetically diabolical”

“multiple points of view”

Pages 8-12 (1)

“Yes yes I will do anything you ask.”

“Under the command of her human”

“she is obliged to obey”

“hypnotized”

“For this, I was born”

Comment: If the title character will be a hypnotic villain, the above may be seen as just setting the stage. But is it inadvertently, mildly, hypnotizing avid readers?  Having learned the basics of hypnosis from my past decades as a psychiatrist, I know that the above is probably sufficient to mildly hypnotize highly hypnotizable people, which may include avid readers in their avid reading frame-of-mind. Indeed, “multiple points of view” may be particularly engaging of readers with a mild degree of multiple personality, which is more common than most people think.

Of course, all successful novelists know ways to engage their readers. It’s their job.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. Fox. New York, Hogarth, 2025. 

“Manhattan Beach” by Jennifer Egan: Protagonist gets advice in the form of an italicized voice in her head

“Have you any brothers?” Tabatha asked.

“A sister,” Anna said.

“How pretty?”

“Extremely pretty,” Anna said gravely, then added, “She looks like our mother, who danced with the Follies.” The error of this boast accosted her a moment later. Never part with a fact unless you’ve no choice. Her father’s voice in her ears” (1, p. 6).

Comment: Why didn’t the text simply say that she remembered her father’s advice? Why did she remember his advice in the form of a voice? Because she had retained his advice in the form of an alternate personality who was made in his image and/or who recalled what he had said.

Persons with alternate personalities may hear their voices in their head (2, p. 94). Novelists often have a normal, creative version of multiple personality, as discussed in many past posts. Also search “italicized voices” in this blog.

1. Jennifer Egan. Manhattan Beach, New York, Scribner, 2017.

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

“The Seducer’s Diary” by Søren Kierkegaard: In the Foreword, Novelist John Updike cites a psychological cause for Kierkegaard’s Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity), as an asset for “indirect communication”

Wikipedia (1) lists Kierkegaard’s alternate identities with minds of their own, but he had not been diagnosed with multiple personality, because of no obvious history of a psychological cause (i.e. childhood trauma, etc).

“This work (The Seducers Diary), a chapter from Kierkegaard’s first major volume, Either/Or, springs from his relationship with his fiancé, Regine Olsen…but then he broke off their engagement…Olsen became a muse for him. His attempt to set right what he felt was a mistake taught him the secret of “indirect communication” (2, back cover).

Comment: I had been puzzled as to why a person with such well-known alternate, writer personalities had never been diagnosed. His dissociative identity, like that of most novelists, was mostly an asset (what I call “Multiple Personality Trait,” not Disorder).

1.Wikipedia. “Søren Kierkegaard.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard

2. Søren Kierkegaard. The Seducer’s Diary with foreword by John Updike. Princeton University Press, 1997. 

Q. What makes Finnegans Wake (1), the novel by James Joyce, difficult to read (1,Wikipedia)?

A. “In this journal article (2), I propose a correlation between James Joyce’s composition techniques that required multiple revisions and his interest in multiple personality, which eventually blossomed into that comedy of multiplicity, Finnegans Wake."

Comment: Although what I call “multiple personality trait” is usually an asset for novelists, it can make a novel hard to understand if not adequately controlled. Also search “James Joyce” in this blog for relevant past posts.

1. Wikipedia. “Finnegans Wake.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake

2. Fordham, Finn. “‘Circe’ and the Genesis of Multiple Personality.” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 3/4, 2008, pp. 507–20. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30244392  

Both Helen Oyeyemi (yesterday’s post) and Joyce Carol Oates (1) have complex multiplicity   

                                                             

“Your struggle with your buried self, or selves, yields your art”…Without these ill-understood drives you might be a superficially happier person…but it isn’t likely that you will create anything of substance (1, p. 24). 

“I acknowledge that I share a name and a face with ‘JCO,’ this expression suggests, but this is a mere convenience. Please don’t be deceived! 'JCO’ is not a person, nor even a personality [in the usual sense] but a process that has resulted in a sequence of texts” (1, p. 153).

Comment: Joyce Carol Oates says her mind is too unusual to call ‘JCO’ a “personality” in the usual sense, but it is not her regular self. Also see old past posts on Joyce Carol Oates.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. The Faith of a Writer (Life Craft Art). NewYork, ECCOHarperCollins, 2004.