Reading Room

The People Inside

by Edward Dolnick

George is the tough guy.
Sandi is the terrified four-year-old.
Joanne is the outgoing adolescent.
Elizabeth knows them all.
Julia - who is all of them - knows none.

Julia Wilson* keeps a clock in every room of her house. When she looks at her watch, she checks not only the time but the date, to make sure that she has not somehow lost an entire chunk of her life.

Julia is, in novelist Kurt Vonnegut's phrase, "un-struck in time." "Since I was three or four," she says, "I've lost time. I remember being in the third grade, for instance, and I remember going back after Christmas break, and the next thing I knew it was fall, around October, and I was in the fifth grade."

Recounting the story now, two decades later, there is bewilderment and not-quite-subdued panic in her voice. "I knew who my teacher should have been, and I wasn't in her classroom," she says. "Everyone was working on a report, and I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.

"I remember another time, eleven or twelve years ago," she recalls. "I was sitting in a kind of scummy bar, the kind of place I don't frequent. And I was talking to this guy, I had no idea who he was, but he seemed to know me a whole lot better than I knew him. It was, 'Whoa, get me out of here.' Believe me, this is not a relaxing way to live."

The fear of falling down one of those memory holes has become a preoccupation. "I might go home today and find out that my daughter, who is nine, graduated from high school last week," she says. "Can you imagine living your life that way?"

Julia is only now finding out how she loses time, and why. Her story is so strange that she herself is alternately fascinated and appalled by it. Julia has multiple personalities: She harbors within herself scores of alter egos. Some are aware of one another; some are not. Some are friendly; still others are murderously angry with Julia and leave signed notes threatening to cut and burn her.

For centuries, doctors have written up case histories that sound uncannily like Julia's. But it was only in 1980 that the bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, first recognized multiple personalities as a legitimate illness.

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