“Listen for the Lie” (post 2) by Amy Tintera: Protagonist has both Dissociative (Psychogenic) Amnesia and Dissociative Identity (Multiple Personality)

Lucy has had dissociative (psychogenic) amnesia for the circumstances of her best friend’s death. Memory gaps are a major symptom of multiple personality. The protagonist also has a voice in her head that has a mind of its own, which is the essence of alternate personalities.

And the fact that Amy Tintera made Lucy a published author (1, p. 247) suggests that she identified with her protagonist, and, thus, may have the higher-functioning version of multiple personality, multiple personality trait, a creative asset.

1. Amy Tintera. Listen for the Lie. New York, Celadon, 2024. 

“Listen for the Lie” (post 1) by Amy Tintera: People think Lucy killed her best friend, but Lucy can’t remember that night, and can’t believe she did it

“A soft voice, a voice I [Lucy] always try to ignore, whispers in my ear, Let’s kill—” (1, p. 15).

Comment: I’m curious to see how the author explains it.

1. Amy Tintera. Listen for the Lie. New York, Celadon, 2024.

“Throne of Glass” by Sarah J. Maas: Italicized, third-person voice of alternate personality in character’s head

        “Yes, she would go—to Rifthold, to anywhere, even through the Gates of the Wyrd and into Hell itself, if it meant freedom.

  “After all, you aren’t Adarlan’s Assassin for nothing” (1, p.19).

Comment: Since the italicized sentence addresses the character in the third person, it is probably not the character’s own thought, but the voice in her head of an alternate personality. Search “italics,” “italicized,” and “italicized voices” in this blog for examples in other novels. 

In a novel, this may reflect an author’s creative, multiple personality trait, the main subject of this blog.

1. Sarah J. Maas. Throne of Glass. New York, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012/2023.

2. Wikipedia. “Sarah J. Maas.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_J._Maas

Two Introductions to Novelist Stephen King: 

1. Links to Current New York Times Book Review

2. Search “Stephen King” in This Blog for past posts

1. Current New York Times Book Review

https://www.nytimes.com/article/stephen-king-books.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/books/review/stephen-king-carrie-50-anniversary.html

2. Search “Stephen King” and/or specific titles of his books, in this blog.

“Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert” by Brian Herbert, his eldest son, who does not say the author of Dune had multiple personality

Comment: This 576-page biography (1) includes an index, which does not reference “split personality,” “multiple personality,” or “dissociative identity “disorder,” either for Frank Herbert, Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune, or even Frank Herbert’s earlier novel, The White Plague, in which the protagonist has explicit multiple personality disorder (see recent posts).

Of course, if an author did have “multiple personality trait,” my term for a nonclinical, creative version of the disorder, the author would neither be nor look mentally ill, and would not exhibit behavior that the average person would recognize as a split personality; except, possibly, in an emotional crisis, or in response to questions about memory gaps, pseudonyms, or episodes of behavior that were atypical for that person.

1. Brian Herbert. Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert. New York, Tor, 2003.

“The White Plague” (post 3) by Frank Herbert: Gratuitous Multiple Personality by the Author of “Dune”

“The transition had gone much more simply than he had anticipated. There remained one more essential detail to complete it. Over the next three days, he removed the hair from his head. There had been a choice—shave or do something more permanent. He chose the latter course, not an insurmountable task for a biochemist, although it proved painful and left a fine network of pink scars…The mole on his left cheek vanished under an application of liquid nitrogen…The change fascinated him…He smiled. John Roe O’Neill, rather plump and with a rich matt of brown hair, a distinctive mole on his cheek, had become this bald, slender man with eyes of burning intensity.

“Hello, John Leo Patrick McCarthy, he whispered.

“None of his old mildness had survived. This Other was driven from within" (1, pp. 38-39).

Comment: The protagonist’s old and new personalities now differ in their names, memories, attitudes, and preferred appearance, making it explicitly clear that he has a split personality (a.k.a. multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder). Of course, it’s presence in this novel is gratuitous, since revenge plots, per se, do not require it.

When recently thinking of reading Frank Herbert’s blockbuster “Dune” novels, I discovered that he’d previously written this explicitly multiple personality novel. So, I thought, for the purpose of this blog, it would waste my time to look for gratuitous symptoms of multiple personality in the “Dune” epic if the author had already shown his affinity for multiple personality in The White Plague, which I’ve now confirmed.

Meanwhile, I’ve ordered a biography of Frank Herbert to see if anything else connects him to the multiple personality trait I’ve previously detected in many other great novelists, which is the subject of this blog.

1. Frank Herbert. The White Plague. New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982.

“The White Plague” (post 2) by Frank Herbert: A New Personality

“The pattern of change built itself slowly in John Roe O’Neill…At such times, he thought of the old beliefs in possession. It was like that—another personality taking over his flesh and nerves.

Much later, he came to a personal accommodation with this Other, even a sense of familiarity and identity. He thought of it then as partly his own making, partly a thing rising out of primal darkness, a deliberate creation for the task of revenge. Certainly, his Old Self had not been up to such a deed. The kindly teacher-of-the-young could not have contemplated such a plan for an instant. The Other had to come into being first.

As this change became fixed in its purpose, John saw an astonishing alteration in his appearance. The old almost plump self went stringing down to a slender, nervous man…The change within him had become an obsession. Then he looked at himself in the bedroom mirror one Saturday morning and knew he would have to take action. Mary and the twins had been dead and buried four months. The Other was strong in him now; a new face, a new personality” (1, pp. 28-29).

1. Frank Herbert. The White Plague. New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982.

2. Wikipedia. “The White Plague.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague.

“The White Plague” (post 1) by Frank Herbert (author of “Dune”): Memory Gap for Terrorist Car-Bombing in Ireland

His wife had been decapitated and the twins killed. “Somewhere within him there existed an understanding of that scene…He knew he had seen what he had seen: the explosion, the death. Intellectual awareness argued the facts. I was standing at that window, I must have seen the blast. But the particulars lay behind a screen he could not penetrate. It lay frozen within him, demanding action lest the frozen thing thaw and obliterate him” (1, pp. 15-16).

Comment: Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of dissociative identity disorder (a.k.a. multiple personality disorder). It happens when the regular or “host” personality is not co-conscious with the alternate personality who has a particular memory. In the above, “Intellectual awareness” may be a logical alternate personality who tells the host personality what must have happened. Another alternate personality may be demanding action.

I don’t know whether the author will label this as an intentional case of multiple personality, or it is merely a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait.

Added same day: A person with more than one personality can both know and not know something or both remember and not remember something.

1. Frank Herbert. The White Plague. New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982.

2. Wikipedia. “Frank Herbert.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert 

“What Happened To The Bennetts” by Lisa Scottoline: Hearing Voices Help Father and Young Son Cope with Murder of Sister

“Do you think she’s a ghost [asks young son]? 

“Well, I [Father] believe she’s always with us. Her soul is with us.

“I believe that, too. I talk to her, Dad. Is that weird?

“No, not at all. I talk to her, too, and I hear her voice…(1, p. 125).

“I [Father] sat at the laptop in the kitchen, on autopilot…I had been online for hours, scrolling mindlessly. The house was quiet. I felt raw, exhausted, and broken, alone with my thoughts.

“What can you do about it?” (1, p. 169).

Comment: Since ordinary thoughts do not hold conversations with the regular self or address the regular self in the third person—but alternate personalities may do so—the above suggests that a mild form of multiple personality is helping this father and son cope with a death in the family.

But since no character has been labeled as having multiple personality, the above may reflect the author’s multiple personality trait.

1. Lisa Scottoline. What Happened To The Bennetts. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2022. 

“Louder Than Hunger” by John Schu: “In achingly honest free verse, the author takes readers inside the life of a boy with an eating disorder and a loud voice in his head” (front flap)

—Who is this narrator?

“I’m hoping by writing my name (Jake) over and over, I’ll figure out who I am” (1, pp. 5-6).

Comment: How could he know everyone calls him “Jake,” but not be sure who he is? Perhaps the narrator is really a nameless alternate personality.

He says, “I look at a photo of Emily Dickinson taped to my desk. I know her poem by heart. “I’m nobody! Who are you…Are you—Nobody—too? (1, p. 8).

—Mirror 

“In the mirror is an ugly, grotesque blob staring back at me, telling me I’m a waste of space, pathetic, worthless. Is that really me? I usually avoid mirrors” (1, p. 50).

Comment:“MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror…In some instances, these alterations of perception of self are so disturbing that the individuals may phobically avoid mirrors (2, p. 62).

—Title, Louder Than Hunger

Comment: The title of this book refers to the loud, coherent voice that the protagonist hears in his head. This title, in and of itself, suggests that this is a multiple personality story: “Almost always, the voices (in MPD) are described as being “heard” within the patient’s head or experienced as ‘loud thoughts.’ They are usually heard clearly and distinctly. These features can help to distinguish them from the auditory hallucinations found in schizophrenic patients, which are more often (but certainly not always) experienced as emanating from outside the person and are often heard indistinctly. The hallucinatory voices of MPD patients often carry on lengthy discussions that seem coherent and logical to the patient” (2, p. 62).

Like novelists conversing with their characters.

1. John Schu. Louder Than Hunger. Somerville Massachusetts, Candlewick Press, 2024.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“My Dark Vanessa” by Kate Elizabeth Russell: Non-Sequential Chapters Suggest Author’s Multiple Personality Trait

The chapters of this novel are not chronological. They skip back and forth through the years, as if the author’s mind had different compartments for different parts of the story. And since compartmentalization (into alternate personalities) is the basic format of a mind with multiple personality, non-sequential chapters might suggest an author’s multiple personality trait. 

—Incidental Signs of Split (Multiple) Personality:

“The question makes me split off from myself, like my body stays beside his while my brain retreats to the seminar table” (1, p. 44).

“I can’t focus on what is happening, my mind so far away it might as well belong to someone else” [an alternate personality] (1, p. 82).

“He did that to you, now you do this to him. You can handle a few minutes of this” (1, p. 101). (Protagonist hears an italicized voice of an alternate personality in her head.)

“Even when I try to recall it now, I can’t quite remember” (1, p. 137). (A multiple personality memory gap.)

“It doesn’t feel like my hand moving the mouse around the screen. Someone else [an alternate personality] guides it…” (1, p. 143).

1. Kate Elizabeth Russell. My Dark Vanessa. New York, William Morrow/HarperCollins. 2020. 

“A Little Life” (post 9) by Hanya Yanagihara: Misdiagnosis and Incompetent Treatment

Comment: I lost patience with this novel [when I gathered that] neither its author nor its reviewers understood that Jude had dissociative identity disorder (see posts 1-8).

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016. 

Added March 17: Jude's suicide [probably] results from incompetent treatment of his dissociative identity disorder (a.k.a. multiple personality disorder).

“A Little Life” (post 8) by Hanya Yanagihara: Try to Diagnose and Fix Jude or be Neglectful and Immoral

“The person he thought he knew turned out to be, in some ways, not the person before him, and it had taken him time to figure out how many facets he had yet to see: it was as if the shape he had all along thought was a pentagram was in reality a dodecahedron [twelve faces], many sided and many fractaled [infinitely complex] and much more complicated to measure…When he had promised himself that he wouldn’t try to repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not only neglectful but immoral” (1, p. 586).

Comment: Will the author ever make the multiple personality diagnosis?

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

“A Little Life” (post 7) by Hanya Yanagihara: When you look at people with undiagnosed multiple personality, you see only a fraction of who they are

“…it made me remember that what I knew of him [Jude] was just a tiny fraction of who he was” (1, p. 417).

Comment: In spite of the ample evidence of Jude’s multiple personality cited in posts 1-6, the author had not recognized its presence in her own central character. Why? Probably because she had intended to write a serious, literary novel, and had thought of multiple personality as a cheap gimmick found only in commercial novels, which is disproved by this, her own, literary novel.

I will see if the rest of this novel shows more insight into its central character.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016. 

“A Little Life” (post 6) by Hanya Yanagihara: Not labelled as such by the author, italicized voices of alternate personalities converse

“Don’t do it, don’t fool yourself, no matter what you tell yourself, you know what you are, says one voice.

“Take a chance, says the other voice. You’re lonely. You have to try. This is the voice he always ignores.

“This may never happen again, the voice adds, and this stops him.

“It will end badly, says the first voice, and then both voices fall silent, waiting to see what he will do.

“He doesn’t know what to do; he doesn’t know what will happen. He has to find out. Everything he has learned tells him to leave; everything he has wished for tells him to stay. Be brave, he tells himself.  Brave for once" (1, pp. 357-358).

Comment: Judging by Wikipedia (2), neither the author nor reviewers of this novel recognized passages like the above as conversation among alternate personalities in multiple personality, which is probably in the novel as a reflection of the multiple personality trait in most great novelists, a theme of this blog.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

2. Wikipedia. “A Little Life.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Life 

“A Little Life” (post 5) by Hanya Yanagihara: Italicized voices in Jude’s head argue with each other

"It’s all within the law, he would argue with the Harold-in-his head.

“Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should, Harold-in-his-head would shoot back at him” (1, p. 276).

Comment: Ordinary thoughts are not italicized, but voices of alternate personalities are italicized. So the above is an argument between one of Jude’s Jude-identified alternate personalities and one of Jude’s Harold-identified alternate personalities. 

What goes on in the mind of a person with multiple personality may be quite complicated, too complicated to handle by the mind of a person who is psychotic, which is one reason that multiple personality is not classified as a psychosis.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016. 

“A Little Life” (post 4) by Hanya Yanagihara: Jude has memory gaps, the foremost diagnostic symptom for multiple personality

“He will (though he won’t be able to remember how later) somehow work himself into a standing position, get himself out of the tub, take some aspirin, go to work…My life, he will think, my life. But he won’t be able to think beyond this…as he slips into that other world that he visits when he is in such pain, that world he knows is never far from his own but that he can never remember after: My life” (1, pp. 176-177).

“The…most commonly reported dissociative symptom in MPD (a.k.a. “dissociative identity disorder”) was amnesias (98%) (a.k.a. “memory gaps”)…(2, p. 59).

Comment: Since the author has not explicitly mentioned the diagnosis—“multiple personality” or “dissociative identity disorder”—I can’t credit the author with giving it to her main character knowingly. Perhaps the author has high-functioning multiple personality trait.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. 

“A Little Life” (post 3) by Hanya Yanagihara: Jude Argues with Himself, a Sign of Multiple Personality

“…increasingly he [Jude] was certain Willem [a friend] knew something. (Knows what? he’d [an alternate personality would]  argue with himself…You’re just looking for a reason to tell him, and then what will he think of you? Be smart. Say nothing. Have some self-control)” (1, p. 108).

Textbook: “Many host [regular] personalities already have some form of communication with the other personalties when they present for treatment, although they are usually not aware of what is actually happening. The experience of the host personality is that he or she gets into arguments with himself or herself" (2, p. 82).

Comment: Ambivalence, per se, would assume the presence of only one person who has mixed feelings; whereas arguing, per se, would assume the presence of two people, the regular personality and an alternate personality, which is experienced as if it were another person. Therefore, arguing with yourself (as opposed to ordinary ambivalence) is a sign of multiple personality.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“A Little Life” (post 2) by Hanya Yanagihara: More Clues to Multiple Personality

—Novel: “You know he cuts himself, don’t you? [asked the doctor]. “No,” his friend says (1, p. 80).

—Textbook: “Suicidal behavior is extremely common in MPD patients…Self-mutilation—typically cutting with glass or razor blades, or burning with cigarettes or matches—occurs in at least a third of MPD patients. The percentage of self-mutilators is probably much higher, because the behavior is often not reported to therapists (2, p. 64).

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“A Little Life” (post 1) by Hanya Yanagihara: Character perceives his mirror image as being its own person who also feels disgust for him

—from Novel

“ ‘You’re a coward,’ he said to his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His face looked back at him, tired with disgust” (1, p. 25).

—from Textbook

“MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror” (2, p. 62).

Comment: The novelist could have simply said that the mirror reflected the character’s own opinion. But: “His face looked back at him” suggests that the person in the mirror had his own opinion, which happened to agree with the character’s opinion. Thus, the novel has a milder form of the textbook’s multiple personality symptom. Whether or not my interpretation has gone too far may be judged by what I do or don’t find in the rest of the novel.

1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.