“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.