BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

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Friday, March 25, 2022

“Slammed” by Colleen Hoover (author post 2): Author’s first novel is about mistaken, multiple identities


Layken, 18, meets Will, 21, and they fall in love before realizing she is a high school senior registered for an elective poetry class that he teaches, causing them to pretend not to know each other.


“We’ve got this whole facade between us, like we’re different people all the time, and it’s exhausting!  I never know when you’re Will or Mr. Cooper and I really don’t know when I’m supposed to be Layken or Lake [her nickname]” (1, pp. 133-134).


The author’s multiple personality concerns are camouflaged in a romantic comedy.


1. Colleen Hoover. Slammed. New York, Atria, 2012.

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