Dissociative Identity Disorder in Popular Culture - Books and Short Stories

Books and Short Stories

• Mary Higgins Clark's 1992 novel All Around the Town is about a young woman who is believed to have committed a murder. Psychiatric sessions reveal that she was kidnapped and molested as a girl, and as a result she has DID.
• Shirley Jackson's 1954 novel The Birds' Nest is about a young woman with multiple personalities. Jackson created the character by interviewing a local psychiatrist who had treated a client with DID.
• Lloyd Rose's 2002 Doctor Who novel Camera Obscura is built around the idea of multiple selves, both psychological and physical.
• In Stephen King's book series, The Dark Tower, one of the main characters, Susannah Dean, has stereotypical split personalities.
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, begun in 1983, includes characters who manifest more than one personality; this is portrayed as a mere idiosyncrasy, not a serious psychiatric disorder. One of the most prominent characters is the beggar Altogether Andrews, who has multiple distinct personalities—none of which are named Andrews—each with their own memories and manner of speaking. Other characters with more than one personality include Agnes/Perdita in the "witch series" and Miss Pickles/Miss Pointer in Thud.
• Pat Barker's 1993 novel The Eye in the Door deals with numerous "splits" in the human life and psyche during wartime.
• Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel Fight Club revolves around the bizarre relationship between the mild-mannered protagonist and his radical, anti-consumerist, anarcho-primitivistic alternate personality. The book presents a very idiosyncratic version of MPD in which the identity manifests itself either conterminous to the multiple (as an audiovisual hallucination) or as a more realistic version that manifests while the protagonist believes he is sleeping.
• In Joe Abercrombie's fantasy series, The First Law Trilogy, a character named Logen Ninefingers occasionally succumbs to a darker alternate personality interested only in killing, which is called the Bloody-Nine.
• John R. Maxim's novel Mosaic is about a government experiment that uses people with DID in an attempt to create the perfect assassin.
• Robert Silverberg's 1983 short story "Multiples" describes a future where people with multiple personalities form a subculture similar to the modern gay community. In the story, a "singleton" (a person with one personality) fakes having DID to attract a DID partner and ultimately attempts to fragment her personality in order to become multiple herself.
• Matt Ruff's 2003 novel Set This House in Order concerns two people with classical MPD on a journey of self-discovery.
• In Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the scientist Dr. Henry Jekyll artificially separates his good and evil natures, causing him to switch between two separate personalities through the consumption of a potion of his own creation. The novella has been adapted many times since publication into a variety of different forms of media, including a Broadway musical (Jekyll & Hyde (musical)), a television mini-series (Jekyll (TV series)), a video game (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (video game)) and more than 30 feature films.
• Sidney Sheldon's 1998 novel Tell Me Your Dreams is about a woman named Ashley who has two other selves named Toni and Alette. A string of vicious murders seems to follow Ashley, and the police must work hard to find out who is behind them.
• In Ted Dekker's 2003 novel Thr3e, the main character has three different personalities: himself, a childhood friend, and the villain.
• Hervey Cleckley and Corbett Thigpen's 1957 book The Three Faces of Eve is loosely based on the true story of Chris Costner-Sizemore (who later told her own story in the non-fiction books I'm Eve and A Mind of My Own).
• Science fiction author Philip K. Dick's novels often include themes concerning alternate personalities sometimes intertwined with alternate realities and universes. Notable examples are his 1966 short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale", on which the movie Total Recall is loosely based, and his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly which was also turned into a film.
• In Shana Mahaffey's Sound's Like Crazy, a voice actress, Holly Miller has developed a Multiple Personality Disorder because of a terrible past.
• In the Monster High toy line and book series, there is a character named Jackson Jekyll with an alternate personality named Holt Hyde (DJ Hyde in the books). The two personalities are unaware of one another's existence.
• In C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, at least two of the ghosts have good and evil personalities that have become physically distinct.
• In William Diehl's Novels Primal Fear and sequels Show of Evil and Reign in Hell one of the story's main characters Aaron Stampler appears to suffers from DID but is later revealed to be an act.
• In Max Brook's novel World War Z Paul Redeker developed an alternate personality named Xolelwa Azania.
• In Ellen Hopkins's 2008 novel Identical, Kaeleigh Gardella suffers from DID and believes she is sometimes her late twin sister, Raeanne, who died in a car crash at the age of nine, an event which triggered her father to become sexually abusive.
• In Tamil novel Vittu Vidu Karuppa!(English:Leave me my God!) written by Indra Soundar Rajan, the protagonist Rajendran suffers from DID.