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SPLIT
How does a mind survive experiences it cannot remember—and what happens when those memories begin to surface many decades later?
In this deeply personal memoir, Joan Machlis traces a life shaped by dissociation, secrecy, and the long search for coherence.
Growing up in an intellectually demanding but emotionally barren home, she learned early that thinking was valued and feeling was dangerous. To survive experiences that could not be spoken, her mind created distance—parts of herself that carried different fragments of reality.
For years these strategies allowed her to function in the world while remaining disconnected from significant parts of her own experience.
Only late in life, through years of sustained psychoanalytic work, did the deeper patterns of memory, identify, dissociation, and survival begin to reveal themselves. What follows is a rare first-person account of how a person gradually pieces together a life that once felt fragmented.
Written with clarity and honesty, this memoir offers readers interested in psychology, trauma, identity, and memory an intimate look at dissociation from the inside—and a powerful reminder that the work of becoming whole can begin at any stage of life.
In this deeply personal memoir, Joan Machlis traces a life shaped by dissociation, secrecy, and the long search for coherence.
Growing up in an intellectually demanding but emotionally barren home, she learned early that thinking was valued and feeling was dangerous. To survive experiences that could not be spoken, her mind created distance—parts of herself that carried different fragments of reality.
For years these strategies allowed her to function in the world while remaining disconnected from significant parts of her own experience.
Only late in life, through years of sustained psychoanalytic work, did the deeper patterns of memory, identify, dissociation, and survival begin to reveal themselves. What follows is a rare first-person account of how a person gradually pieces together a life that once felt fragmented.
Written with clarity and honesty, this memoir offers readers interested in psychology, trauma, identity, and memory an intimate look at dissociation from the inside—and a powerful reminder that the work of becoming whole can begin at any stage of life.
136 pages, Paperback
Published March 11, 2026
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