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.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Tuesday, July 29, 2025

“The Thursday Murder Club” by Richard Osman: Both “Deft and Daft”(2)


 Chapter 24  

“With the lights of the village turning out, Elizabeth opens up her appointment diary and attempts today’s question: What was the registration number of Gwen Talbot’s daughter-in-law’s new car?

   “She approves of this question. Not the make of the car; that was too easy. Not the color…But the registration number—that takes genuine recall. As she has done so often before, in a different life, usually in a different country and different century, Elizabeth shuts her eyes and zooms in. She sees it immediately, or does she hear it? It is both; her brain is telling her what she sees." 

“JL17 BCH” (1, p. 86).


Comment: If she is being advised by her brain, is the author implying that Elizabeth (and the author?) hear voices of helpful alternate personalities? What is the reader to make of the above? Even a British reviewer seems to have found Osman’s novel confusing: “Osman’s plotting is both deft and daft in equal measure” (2).


1. Richard Osman. The Thursday Murder Club. New York, Penguin Books, 2020

2. Alfred Hickling. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/03/the-thursday-club-by-richard-osman-review-cosy-caper 

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