The book jacket explains that it started as a suicide note, but the explanation became so interesting to the author that it became a memoir that served as her therapy vehicle, much like this blog has done for me. I love the tone of voice she takes. She avoids several tones I've disliked in other multiple accounts:
- I am a victim; I've been so horribly traumatized. Here's a list of the terrible things I've suffered.
- I am a hero; I beat everything and life will never be bad again!
- I am a professor; here is a treatise on how to cure a multiple.
- I am here to provide you a chronicle of what happened; figure out the emotions yourself.
And none of those are invalid formats; but they sure aren't a lot of fun to read. I read them anyway, for the nuggets of good stuff and thoughts they provoke. But I'm liking this one a lot. I was already familiar with it, a bit, because of a quote I had run into previously. So it's been on my 'To Read' list for a while.
I'm going to re-read the Prologue and put in comments here, probably with some quotes also, and then make myself stop to read more to you later. I appreciate that the author didn't sit down to write a book for people to read; she sat down to explain what she needed to say, and then the writing took over. Writing does that; it does it for me. It's both frightening and terribly rewarding to have the writing take over and pour itself out of you, like being on a log ride that jerks you around and speeds around blind corners and splashes all over you. But when you get to the end, it just feels so exhilarating and joyous.
Scheherazade stayed alive because she was an artful storyteller. I stayed alive because the business of writing about my multiplicity took a whole lot longer than I had imagined, and because within days of beginning this project, I soon grew interested in the task that I had set for myself.
If you've ever tried to write a paper as part of a committee, you may have some sympathy for the struggle it is for a multiple to write a book. There are a number of people looking over your shoulder internally, all making suggestions for changes and wording. My system has agreed that this is basically my project, but I often rewrite entire swathes to observe the needs and opinions of my alters.
The author talks about the struggle she had trying to put the different pieces of the book into some sort of chronological order. But multiples don't think chronologically. It's like trying to take the events of the Back to the Future movies, the Terminator movies, the Aliens series, and Star Trek all into one chronology (by the way - look here). Technically, it can be done, but they don't have anything to do with one another. Or they overlap in conflicting ways. Even better, lets do the chronology as a group project, and no one has seen all the movies; different people have seen different ones.
And once she got some sort of chronological order forced upon the events, then there was the repetition. Each alter told the story from a different point of view, so telling it once is like trying to build a police report of an accident by asking ten different witnesses. Some things will match, others won't. And everyone thinks their version is the 'real true version'. And then - something changed. Trying to match the different stories led to the alters seeing each others' versions and sliding around to overlap them - and some integration began.
So let's stop there for a moment. How much of our individuality is due to our different perceptions of an event? When you go to see live theatre with friends, no two people will see exactly the same show. For any given scene, one person is watching the person delivering the lines, but someone else is watching the supporting actors interacting in the backgroup. Another person is looking at the set, and another has run to the bathroom. No one saw the exact same show. This is where film brings us together as a society. When you see a film, you typically all see much the same show, unlike live theatre, and even less like real life.
But when you have alters comparing what they see/saw in life, it starts to bring them together, until they remember something resembling the same show. This is part of why I blog. By putting down my thoughts here, I am telling my side of the story, but I am also hearing comments from alters about what their view looked like. It brings us together. And if some one of us doesn't have a memory of an event, reading it as I write gives them some context, again bringing us together to think as a group.
No comments:
Post a Comment