A Fractured Mind : My Life with Multiple Personality Disorder — By Robert B. Oxnam
This was an impulse pick from the new books shelf at the library. I’ve never read any of the other famous memoirs about Multiple Personality Disorder, like “Sybil” or “When Rabbit Howls” and I’ve never seen “Three Faces of Eve.” I’ve never been interested in the topic of Multiple Personality Disorder (the term Dissociative Identity Disorder is now preferred.) It’s not that I am skeptical, it just seems too much like a soap opera with all those characters caught in a complicated web of relationships.
I guess I picked this one up partly because I was familiar with Oxnam’s expertise on China. It was interesting in some ways, but there were aspects of the book that I just found quite annoying. I understand that this is a memoir, not a novel, so he can’t be blamed for not improving the story, but after the first few alters I found his various personalities like Young Bob and the Witch and the Baby to be too juvenile and contrived to take seriously. I felt the same way about the whole castle and dungeon and meadow thing. I understand that dissociation is a reaction to childhood trauma and therefore likely to be be constructed in a juvenile way, I just found this stuff pretty hard to take seriously.
I also understand that Oxnam has known many famous people, been on television many times, and had a very distinguished career, and that he was driven to such high achievement by his disorder, but his name-dropping and endless talk about his professional successes is annoying. (This continues on the back cover, where most of the blurbs are written by friends whose names we meet in the book.)
His reluctance to actually name his abusers (though he makes it perfectly clear right from the start who is to blame) or to discuss more about the circumstances, and his reticence to tell us more about his relationships with his mother and children, while understandable and perhaps admirable, makes the picture seem incomplete.
