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.
“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.
