Status Updates From Mind of My Own: The Woman W...

'Admittedly, researchers have determined that less than 10% of all MPD patients have the disorder as the result of indirect trauma outside themselves[.] But [...] what [could] the many popular, but bizarrely violent, movies and television shows doing to the preschoolers of this nation today? Unfortunately we may not know the definitive answers until they become young adults around the year 2000.'

Although Sizemore never successfully gets to meet 'Sybil' (Wilbur fields her away: 'Sybil sees no-one[;] not even you, Chris [...] that's the way it is.') her fundraising and spokespersoning bring her into contact with many of the post-Sybil multiples, including Truddi Chase ('Two, four, six, eight. I don't wanna integrate[.]'). These Eve-among-the-Sybils stories just feel odd somehow.

'Ultimately, however, the responsibility for all my alters' actions lies with me. As the birth personality, I had unconsciously chosen to be beyond awareness [...] so I believe that, even though MPD patients are certainly mentally ill, they should not use the insanity defence because their disorder is, in a sense, a willed negligence of responsibility for their own lives.'

'Those were deaths,' Chris tells her doctor, 'because those alters were alive. I have worn their clothes. I have read their wills. [...] What's more, if I'm the only person who created them, then why am I not solely responsible for their deaths? That's why I keep saying "I killed them". And I will not permit another one to emerge, because I'll have to kill her too. I intend to survive.'

'My life had become as silent as four in the morning[.]'

'I was remembering the way normal people described the process. I was merely thinking in words, rather than recalling in images. / It was a peculiar revelation[.] I finally understood that normal persons do not remember exclusively in flickering images, the way MPD patients do. Normal people remember in a complex, intricate manner that involves words and feelings as well as [...] odours, sounds and images.'

'The other day Don said that I had used him. I told him that was strange because, looking back and recalling how he related to my alters, it seemed that he had used me, that he had secretly thrived on my illness and had gotten excitement from having so many different wives - even the ones who rejected him. Doctor, I now know that the man enjoyed a virtual harem in his bedroom[.]' BWAHhahaha!

'"That's it," I said, and Don looked at me with suspicion, as if he thought I was switching personalities again. "All these years you thought that when I got well, I would be Jane again."

'"She had a beautiful personality," he said in a faint voice, "but I didn't expect her to come back. I never remember any of them returning."'

Definite changes in the I'm Eve narrative here: the 'week of horror' Chris experienced in I'm Eve, reliving her long-repressed past, becomes six weeks; the two disturbing abreactions experienced by the Retrace Lady - the bad burn, and the surgery - are moved to this time, post-'unification'. The endnotes even, bafflingly, invite the reader to compare the two conflicting accounts.

'[Unification] meant the consistent end of not only the disorder but also of my retreat from responsibility for my own life. My alters wanted the disorder to end, but I don't think that I did[.] It was their choices and retreating that thrust me back onto centre stage, whether I wanted that emergence or not. The only other option at the time was for the body, devoid of a personality, to die[.]' What.

Several differences from the I'm Eve narrative here: in addition to becoming aware of another personality 'waiting in the wings' - which wasn't in the original account - the Retrace Lady alter also writes a final diary entry and a goodbye note to her daughter, two days before her disappearance and one day before the vivid hit-and-run hallucination that marks the end of the Purple Lady.

'Strawberry Girl got the last word. Two days later she wrote, "You and Dr. Tit-so can go to hell!" And she added what would become her last entry in the diary: "Strawberry season is over anyway." / In a sense, it would be the Strawberry Girl's epitaph, because she would soon disappear.'

'At one point yesterday, Retrace Lady discovered me. I could feel her horror, but she did not react beyond that initial recoiling. [...] She seemed as astonished to sense my presence as I was at being discovered. That's probably why, when she awakened this morning to find that both Purple Lady and Strawberry Girl were still absent but that I remained and she was not alone, Retrace Lady screamed again.'

Sizemore describes her reawakening in Dr. Tsitos' office in 1974 - when she was 47 - as an emergence from 44 years of hiding. Which means she dates her disappearance, as herself proper, from her experiences at age 2, rather than at around age 10 as I'm Eve implies. The trouble is, I'm Eve's 'present day' segments have Sizemore still describing herself as 'I' - not 'she' - until at least age 6.

I'm Eve showed us a woman reluctantly coming to agree with her doctors that she'd spent 'forty years in fantasy': 'No one really comes. She just becomes what she needs to be to face life.' The Preface undercuts this at once. Sizemore still describes her multiplicity as a 'neurosis', but adds: 'These alters [...] were entities that were totally separate from the personality I was born to be, and am today.'

'Unlike my case history of MPD, Judy described her multiplicity as a consistently productive state. Among other accomplishments, she had earned a six-year Harvard degree in half the normal time.'

Chris and Taffy attend a parapsychology seminar where the participants are given spoons to bend (aww!). Chris is a dismal spoon-bending failure, but on trying to drive home finds that the metal bands in her carpal-tunnel braces have warped so badly she can barely move her fingers. 'Am I the focus of unexplainable psychic disturbances for some reason?', Chris melodramatically wonders.

Sudden parapsychology, now - though I think 'and then this weird thing happened!' anecdotes must show up in every autobiography ever. Chris has monochrome 'visual flashes' of Reagan's shooting, while she drives. (I once saw, for a brief flash while my brother was flicking through TeleText, a headline saying 'President's Plane Missing', but that - sadly, as it was Bush - didn't come true.)

'The same true story had already been exploited in another film, "Lizzie", in which Eleanor Parker played the triple role of the patients.' Wrong, Mr. 'Manchester Guardian' reviewer: 'Lizzie' was based on Jackson's The Bird's Nest, the novel whose surprising public success made Thigpen and his cronies start considering Chris's story marketable in the first place. Step off Shirley, hack-man!

After a long series of 'healing dreams' in which Chris speculates her subconscious finally unified itself for keeps, Chris now remembers things that happened to the 'Jane' personality as happening to her. I wonder if that happened eventually to 'Sybil', too.

Feeling hemmed in by her own hand-me-downs, Chris begins throwing out her old alters' things and meets unexpected resistance: 'Taffy gasped and held up an old black Bible. "How could you throw this away?" she moaned. "It belonged to my real mother." / Bobby had also been squirrelling aside several items that had belonged to the Purple Lady, his favourite among my alters, and he joined Taffy in objecting.'