“THE STEPS, A Memoir” by Sylvester Stallone

Chapter 9: Sink or Swim (1, pp. 64-66)

“I knew that I might not make it as a successful actor, but I had to make it as something. Time to sink or swim, Sly…

     Writing. I’d been writing for years, though not for film.

     Maybe you could do that, Sly…

     At first, all I really did was mimic existentialist playwrights—Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco, Genet, Albee, too…When I wasn’t being a mimic, I filled my notebook with random bits of admittedly overly dramatic poetry…Obviously, they were all failures…

     But if I could learn the screenplay form, I thought that could be my leaky lifeboat…

     The word choice had to be very specific…You have to know what makes them [characters] tick. Easy to say, very hard to do…And quite often, a solution came to me…

     It may sound foolish, but that inner voice is never fully off. The spirit never takes a nap, ever. I often felt at the time that it was helping me through the darkness. It was constantly around…What I hadn’t realized until then is that it helps to actively ask for this kind of guidance, instead of just sitting around and hoping it happens.

    This guiding force led me eventually to creating the world of Rocky. [It said:] You better prepare yourself to get hurt and face emotional setbacks, Sly (1, p. 57).” 

Comment: It is the voice of a creative, alternate personality. I don’t hear any such voices with minds of their own. Do you? Fiction writers commonly put such voices in italics, as I’ve previously discussed in past posts.

1. Sylvester Stallone. The Steps, a memoir. New York, William Morrow, 2026.

“Fictional Selves, a Memoir” by Kyle MacLachlan

From the front flap (1):

“Everywhere I go, I am followed by a mystery man. He looks like me—but not quite. . .  On talk shows, I sip coffee on couches and pretend to be him; on social media, I put on his mask to engage in suburban silliness. . .  And of course, we work together. But for him, the movies and TV shows never end. . . Where does this guy—this Kyle MacLachlan—end, and where do I begin? And is he even real? And, holy mackerel. . . am I?

To be in the black suit or not to be? Kyle MacLachlan’s funny, moving, and playfully self-aware memoir charts a career that could belong to no other. Plucked from obscurity to star in David Lynch’s Dune, the Hollywood blockbuster that never was, MacLachlan rebounded with a startling performance in Lynch’s provocative masterpiece Blue Velvet, which would mark him as a master of the unusual and ultimately lead to his career-defining role as Agent Dale Cooper on the TV sensation Twin Peaks.

Fictional Selves is a book of doppelgängers, with MacLachlan mirrored by his own prodding ego (“Other Kyle”), the iconic characters he inhabited, and the ones that eluded his grasp but gave him a profound and surprising lens through which to see himself as a person and a performer.” (1).

Comment: Doppelgängers are alternate personalities. Search “Actors” in this blog for relevant past posts.

1. Kyle MacLachlan. Fictional Selves, a Memoir. New York, Crown, 2026.

“Wrong Norma” by Anne Carson (Winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize):

A subtle paragraph from the book. (1, p. 63):

“Christopher Hitchens once told me that having a child is like your own heart walking around in another body. So there went my own heart walking toward its own death, every millennium, every hour closer. I could not bear this. I decided to make a deal with the laws of physics, or maybe it was the laws of metaphysics, I get those two confused, anyway we all agreed that if Herakles were to set himself on fire and burn to death, his finite human nature could be purged away in the flames and leave the infinite part, the part like me. I thought this a clever solution. Unfortunately, I overlooked the essence of death as an event: it happens in time. For a mortal creature death is instantaneous - you’re alive one minute, dead the next. But for a creature who exists (like myself), outside time, death has no instant. I have no instant.  I am at all times. I have to watch my most beloved child burn to death at all times. And I always will.

Comment: The speaker sees herself as outside time, which would be true  only if she were the human author’s alternate personality.

1. Anne Carson. Wrong Norma. New York, New Directions Books, 2024. 

The New York Times Book Review (1) Says Novel “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn Was No.1 Best Thriller of the 21st Century, But Fails to Note Protagonist’s Declaration She has Multiple Personality (2)

1. NYTimes’ article dated August 04, 2026: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/books/gone-girl-book-thriller-21st-century.html

2. Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl. New York, Crown Publishers, 2012, “The way some women change fashion, I change personalities…” ( p, 222).

“The Disappearers” (a 640 page novel) by Marlon James (1), who praised Toni Morrison’s literary perspective:

“One of the things I learned from Morrison is not to be afraid to put the character and the reader in an uncomfortable position.” (2)

Comment: Search Toni Morrison in this blog to see how she illustrated my concept of “multiple personality trait” and creativity.

1. Marlon James. The Disappearers. Riverhead Books, Penguin Group, 2026.

2. BookPage: https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/disappearers-marlon-james-book-review/

“TRAVELS” by Michael Crichton, who calls himself "dissociated"

“From then on, whenever I visited the cactus, I had a funny dissociated attitude (1, p. 250)…Suddenly I heard a booming voice. It seemed to be inside my head" (1, 256-257).

Comment: Crichton is another successful novelist with the dissociative asset.                      

1. Michael Crichton. Travels. New York, Vintage Books. 1988/2014.

2. "Michael Crichton." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton 

The Late, Great Dolly Parton (1) Heard a Religious, Creative Voice in her Head, Reports a New York Times’ Newsletter (2)

Comment: This is yet another example of the creative asset I call Multiple Personality Trait, as opposed to Multiple Personality Disorder.

1. Wikipedia. “Dolly Parton.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_Parton

2. Believing, New York Times’ Newsletter article: “Dolly Parton Heard A Voice”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/30/briefing/dolly-parton-god-voice-song.html 

In “All That’s Unseen, An Appalachian Memoir” by Emilee Hackney, she has an out-of-body experience in which “The Holy Spirit” tells her to marry her boyfriend

“My Bible was open on my bed. I’d been reading in Psalms when I was overwhelmed by a sudden heaviness. The Holy Spirit was in the room. It commanded me to stand and pray” (1, p. 95).

“I didn’t have words as much as a willingness to receive. Speak to me, Father, I thought, arms stretched toward the ceiling in supplication.”

“A whisper of urgency tugged at my heart, telling me to close and reopen my Bible. I moved quickly, letting the book fall open.”

“Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, chapter 19. My eyes landed on verse 5 near the top of the page. So a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”

“For a moment nothing happened, and then I was being sucked out of myself, a thousand miles from my room and body. There was a desert. The sand was as black as coal, and the ground parched, shattered like broken glass.”

“Suddenly the jagged cracks glowed orange, then red. Magma was rising just beneath the surface of the earth. I waited for it to spill over. Instead, the broken pieces of ground began to converge. The cracks were filled and fused by the red-hot liquid. The magma cooled. The black earth was healed, solid and perfectly smooth.”

“When I returned to my body, I was on my knees beside the bed, breathless and overwhelmed. I pulled myself up and reached for my Bible, which was still open to Matthew. I read verse 5 again.”

“Warm and calm, awash in the Spirit, I knew with that powerful, inexplicable knowing what God was trying to tell me.”

“He wanted me to marry Sam.”

I’d never had a vision before, at least not like that…I had never been carried away from my body…or seen something as clearly as if I’d been watching a movie screen” (1, pp. 95-96).

Comment: The above has the structure of a conversation between alternate personalities in dissociative identity (formerly called “multiple personality).”

1. Emilee Hackney. All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir. New York, Penguin Press, 2026.

“Flesh” a novel by David Szalay: Why did the author leave page 36 blank?

What was the protagonist’s intention when he pushed his lover’s husband down the stairs, and the man didn’t get up? He didn’t stop to think about it until the police came after him. And why did the author go so far to avoid such issues by leaving the next page (page 36) blank? Did the author and Booker Prize judges tend to avoid dissociative issues in both authors and their characters?

Comment: When I saw a blank page, I first thought it was an error.

1. David Szalay. Flesh. New York, Scribner, 2026.

 “THE BROKEN KING,” a memoir by Michael Thomas, who says he has been “dissociative”

“I’d been trying for the last three years to get sober, but every time I went for more than a week without a drink, I’d enter what a psychologist would later call a fugue state…I’d come to in a different city…walking down a street and snap back into consciousness… When I wasn’t drunk, I was dissociative…When I wasn’t psychologically removed, I was suicidal. When I wasn’t despairing, I was enraged” (1. p. 10-12).

Comment: The writer with the most famous fugue state was Agatha Christie, who wandered off and couldn’t be located for eleven days in 1926.

Wandering off with a change of identity is suggestive of dissociative identity, previously called multiple personality, which was probably not considered in this memoir, except that the title’s word “broken” suggests the idea of broken into parts, a common euphemism for alternate personalities.

1. Michael Thomas. The Broken King (a memoir). New York, Grove Press, 2025.

“COMMUNION: Finding My Way Back to Faith” by JD Vance (1, 2), But since when has that been his name?

JD Vance is currently Vice President under President Trump.

1. JD Vance. Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. New York, HarperCollins. 2026.

2. Wikipedia. (2026). “JD Vance.” See Note at end of entry (page 10 of 28 pp): “Vance was named James Donald Bowman at birth. Afterward, he was adopted by his mother’s third husband and had his name changed to James David Hamel. In April, 2013, he adopted his maternal grandparents’ surname of Vance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JD_Vance

Comment: Among multiple possible names, perhaps he has chosen the one that best suited his preferred self-image, political image, or religious beliefs at any given time. I don’t know if he has ever had memory gaps, which would raise the possibility of dissociative identity. I’m planning to read Communion (1) to see if those and other issues are clarified.

His Excellency GEORGE WASHINGTON by Joseph J. Ellis

“But he placed the emphasis for his radical evolution, elsewhere, indeed inside himself: ‘an Innate Spirit of freedom first told me,’ he explained, ‘that the Measures which [the] Administration hath for sometime been, and now are, most violently pursuing, are repugnant to every principle of natural justice’ (1, p. 63).

“While we cannot know, at least in the fullest and deepest sense, where that voice inside himself originated, it does seem to echo the resentful voice of the young colonel in the Virginia Regiment [himself]…”

Comment: The voice he hears may be the voice of his own brave alternate personality. 

1. Joseph J. Ellis. His Excellency George Washington, New York, Vintage Books, 2005. 

“Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs That Drove The Third Reich” by Richard Weikart

“Since it is so difficult to pinpoint exactly what Hitler’s religion was, it might seem his religion was historically inconsequential. However, hopefully this study of Hitler’s religion sheds light on a number of important issues. First, his anti-Christianity obviously shaped the persecution of the Christian churches during the Third Reich. Second, his religious hypocrisy helped explain his ability to appeal to a broad constituency. Third, his trust that his God would reward his efforts and willpower, together with his sense divine mission, imbued him with hope, even in hopeless circumstances. This helps us understand why he was so optimistic until the very end, when it should have been obvious much earlier that the game was up. Finally, and most importantly, his religion did not provide him with any transcendent morality. Whatever Hitler’s stance on other religious issues, his morality was entirely of this world, derived from his understanding of the workings of nature. In my view, this was the most pernicious element of his religion. Hitler followed what he considered the dictates of nature by stealing, killing and destroying. Ultimately, however, he perished, because his God could not give him life (1, pp. 279-280). 

1. Richard Weikart. Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs That Drove The Third Reich. Regnery History, Salem Media Group, 300 New Jersey Ave NW, Washington, DC. 

“Hitler’s Last Witness, The Memoirs of Hitler’s Bodyguard, Rochus Misch, reports Hitler felt His Military Orders Were Being Misunderstood.

So from then On, He Had His Orders Transcribed by Stenographers, which Proved, Says Misch, et al, That Hitler Had a “Photographic Memory” (1, p. 96).

Comment: And, Perhaps, a High-Functioning Split Personality.

1. Rochus Misch. Co-authored by Michael Stehle, Professor Jörrn Precht, Ralph Giordano, Regina Carstensen, and Dr. Sandra Zarrinbal. London, Frontline Books 2017. 

“HITLER: Ascent 1889-1939” by Volker Ullrich: Hitler’s “internal contradictions”

“The main reason it is so difficult to decipher ‘the riddle of Hitler’ is the fact that his personality contained so many astonishing contrasts and contradictions. As early as 1936, Konrad Heiden described Hitler’s ‘dual nature.’ Like a medium, Heiden argued, the human being Adolf Hitler channelled and created, through a monstrous act of will, the phenomenon Adolph Hitler: ‘In moments of repose, the latter lies curled up and hidden within the former, only to emerge in moments of intensity to conceal the former behind its larger-than-life puppets mask.’ For Heiden, this split personality is what made it so difficult to reach reliable conclusions about Hitler.

“More than one of Hitler’s acquaintances confirmed this impression. Otto Dietrich pointed to Hitler’s ‘uncanny dual nature,’ arguing that the Führer’s internal contradictions were so intense that they became ‘the dominant characteristic of his entire being.’ On the one hand, Dietrich asserted, Hitler possessed extraordinary capabilities and gifts. On the other, and partially in conjunction with his fanatical anti-Semitism, he could be intellectually primitive and boorish. In Hitler’s breast, Dietrich wrote, ‘respectable sensibilities and ice-cold heartlessness, love and horrific cruelty lived side by side.’ ” (1, p.381)

Comment: Hitler may have had a form of dissociative identity disorder.

1.Volker Ullrich. Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939. Trans. From the German by Jefferson Chase. New York, Vintage Books, 2016. 

 “ROOSEVELT’S SECRET WAR: FDR and WORLD WAR II ESPIONAGE” by Joseph E. Persico (1) Foreword:

“…Few leaders have been better suited by nature and temperament for the anomalies of secret warfare than FDR. ‘You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does,’ he once confessed. ‘I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help me win the war’…His style of leadership bears out this admission. FDR compartmentalized information, misled associates, manipulated people, conducted intrigues, used private lines of communication, scattered responsibility, duplicated assignments, provoked rivalries, held all the cards while showing few…His behavior, which fascinated, puzzled, amazed and occasionally repelled people, parallels many of the qualities of an espionage chief… 'So you play the game the way it has been played over the years, and you play to win.’

“Still, the President took almost childish delight in subterfuge for its own sake…He deliberately concealed the processes of his mind. His vice president Henry Wallace concluded that the only certainty in dealing with the man was the uncertainty of ‘what went on in FDR’s head’… His inscrutable nature found full play when America went to war. The man with the instincts of spy master now had a war in which to indulge his attraction to the clandestine” (1, xii).

Comment: Compartmentalization (into hidden alternate personality states) is the essence of multiple personality, but it may be an asset, not a mental disorder, in a high-functioning person.

1. Joseph E. Persico. Roosevelt’s Secret War (FDR and World War II Espionage). New York, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002. 

“Leadership” by Doris Kearns Goodwin Highlights How FDR’s Multiple Talents Rescued Fellow Polio Patients and Fellow Americans

“The leader must be ready and able to meet the challenges presented by the times. And no leader was more prepared to diagnose the national malady correctly and assert himself as ‘a vital human need’ than ‘old Doc Roosevelt,’ as he had been affectionally called at Warm Springs, where he had directly engaged with his fellow polio patients as architect, developer, program director, head counselor, therapy director, and spiritual adviser, ‘all rolled into one’…

    ‘Doc’ Roosevelt was ready to minister with frankness, near-mystical confidence, and an unshakable resolve to take whatever actions were necessary to transfuse the nation. He was prepared to administer a sustained, reanimating jolt of new leadership to his paralyzed and despondent nation. After all, in a searing and personal way, he had been through all this before.

   “One week before the March 4, 1933, inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the journalist Agnes Meyer had entered into her diary, ‘the world literally rocking beneath our feet.’ Following three years of precipitous decline, the ‘vital organs’ of the financial system, the nation’s banks, were shutting down. The economic system of the nation had entered a physical and spiritual state akin to death throes.” (1, p. 274).

Comment: I don’t know who became more aware of FDR’s multiple sides, FDR, his family and friends, the public, or historians.

1. Doris Kearns Goodwin. Leadership in Turbulent Times. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2019. 

“FDR” by Jean Edward Smith: President Roosevelt Had a Compartmentalized Mind, Possibly Like That of a High-Functioning Person With Dissociative Identity

“Frances Perkins, FDR’s long-serving secretary of labor, said Roosevelt was ‘the most complicated human being I have ever known.’ He kept major decisions in his own hands, played his cards close to his chest, and enjoyed the consternation of his opponents when his maneuvers were revealed. ‘I’m a juggler,’ Roosevelt told Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. ‘I never let my right hand know what my left hand is doing’ ” (1, p. xi).

Comment: His mind was compartmentalized, possibly like the normal, creative mind of a high-functioning person with dissociative identity.

1. Jean Edward Smith. FDR. New York, Random House, 2007.

2. Wikipedia. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt

“QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain

"Today Laura understands that her introversion is an essential part of who she is, and she embraces her reflective nature. The loop inside her head that accused her of being too quiet and unassuming plays much less often. Laura knows that she can hold her own when she needs to” (1, p. 10). 

Comment: “The loop inside her head…” looks like the repeated entreaties of an extroverted alternate personality, which she overcame by researching and writing this book.

1. Susan Cain. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Crown, New York, 2013.

“Elon Musk” the biography by Ashlee Vance: Does Musk’s Photographic Memory Mean He Has a Normal, Exceptional, Dissociative Identity?

“'At one point, I ran out of books to read at the school library and the neighborhood library,' Musk said… 'So then, I started to read the Encyclopedia Britannica. That was so helpful. You don’t know what you don’t know. You realize there are all these things out there…'

“Elon, in fact, churned through two sets of encyclopedias—a feat that did little to help him make friends. The boy had a photographic memory, and the encyclopedias turned him into a fact factory. He came off as a classic know-it-all” (1, p. 33).

Comment: I just began this biography, and don’t know if it will ever even mention dissociative identity, previously known as “multiple personality.” Please search “photographic memory” in this blog to read my previous discussion of it’s possible relation to dissociative identity.

1. Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk. Ecco, HarperCollins, New York, 2017. 

“REGIME CHANGE: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” by Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan

Q. How does President Trump keep his opinions and plans secret and make the right decisions?

A. “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain, and I’ve said a lot of things” (1, p. 35). 

“He often ran different lines in parallel—or even on triple tracks. Even with his closest aides, there were rooms within rooms and no one had entrance to them all (1. p. 41).

Comment: Why does he say he speaks with himself rather than simply that he thinks?  Apparently, he is speaking to a part of himself that is like another person; that is, one or more alternate personalities. He may have a normal, high-functioning, creative, dissociative identity.

1. Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2026.

Is “A CHILDHOOD” by Harry Crews “THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PLACE,” because the author has no regular personality?

“I have never been certain of who I am” (1, p. 6). 

“I have always slipped into and out of identities as easily as other people slip into and out of their clothes. Even my voice, its inflections and rhythms, does not seem entirely my own…

“On journalism assignments during which I’ve recorded extended interviews…my own voice will inevitably become almost indistinguishable from the voice of the person with whom I’m talking by the third or fourth tape. Some natural mimic in me picks up whatever verbal tics or mannerisms it gets close to. That mimic in myself has never particularly pleased me, but has in fact bothered me more than a little” (1, p .6).

Comment: Without a regular host personality, it is not typical multiple personality. So what is it?

1. Harry Crews. A CHILDHOOD, THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PLACE, Published with a foreword by Tobias Wolff in Penguin Books, 2022.

“The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump (A Psychological Reckoning) by Prof. Dan P. McAdams) (1)

Dan P. McAdams is a Professor of Psychology, especially personality psychology (2).

The Professor adapted his book’s title from Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1, p.1) which is commonly interpreted as related to Dissociative Identity Disorder (a.k.a. Multiple Personality), but Prof. McAdams does not make that diagnosis of Mr. Trump.

1. Dan P. McAdams. The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump. A Psychological Reckoning. New York, N.Y. Oxford University Press, 2020.

2. Wikipedia. “Dan P. McAdams. ”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_P._McAdams 

Overcoming Difficulties in DIAGNOSIS

Of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

by Richard P. Kluft, MD (1)

“The average patient with DID has been in the mental healthcare delivery system an average of 6.8 years and has received more than three other diagnoses, reflecting either misdiagnosis or comorbidities, before receiving an accurate diagnosis of DID (1).

“Most patients with DID, whose manifestations were generally subtle or easily concealed most of the time, exhibit “windows of diagnosability,” during which the manifestations became more overt…

“These observations are consistent with the findings of Putnam..now replicated many times, that the average patient with DID has been in the mental healthcare delivery system an average of 6.8 years and has received more than three other diagnoses, reflecting either misdiagnoses or comorbidities, before receiving an accurate diagnosis of DID…

“The typical differential diagnosis for DID includes other dissociative disorders, psychoses, affective disorders, borderline personality disorder, partial complex seizures, factitious disorders, and malingering…”

Comment: The difficulties in making this now established diagnosis are widely recognized. So please click the article below, read it, and begin to develop your own expertise.

1. Richard P. Kluft, MD. Psychiatric Annals 35:8. AUGUST 2005. Diagnosing Dissociative Identity Disorder (2005).