when they’ve been hurt.
I remember a lot of things that happened in my life.
Sometimes I wish I remembered every little thing. Sometimes
I think that the best gift on dying would be if God gave one
that second between life and death in which to know everything al at once, al that one ever wanted to know. For myself, I’d include every fact of my own experience but especial y the
earliest years - and I'd like to know everything about my
parents, what they thought and what they dreamed. I'd like to
know our lineage al the way back, who my ancestors were
and what made them tick. I have a few questions about lovers
and friends, too. At the same time I want to know the truth
about the cel , the galaxy, the universe, where it began and
how it will end. I’d like to know what the sun is real y like -
it’s not just fire and cold spots - as much as I’d like to know
how there can be so much empty space inside a molecule.
I'd like to go back and redo my high school physics class and
real y master the language of mathematics. I’d like to know if
there is a God and what faith means. I’d like to know how
Shakespeare wrote from the inside out. I know that if there are
black holes in the universe, multiple personalities simply
cannot be impossible. In fact they have God’s mark al over
them as an elegant solution to a vile problem - children forced
to live in hel find ways to chop the hel up, a child becomes
plural, and each part of the plurality must handle some aspect
of the hel as if it’s got al of it. This is more complicated than
fragmenting a personality, but there is nothing difficult to
understand. The child becomes many children, and each has a
personality and work cut out for it; each personality helps the
child endure. What is difficult is how children are hurt, and
sometimes the denial of multiple personalities, which is, of
course, a denial of memory, is also a denial of sexual abuse.
The story isn’t simple enough to be believed by outsiders, but
the victim has found a way to survive. It’s miraculous, real y.
One ritual-abuse survivor with double-digit personalities told
me to think of her as a small army fighting for the rights of
women. I do.
A memoir, which this is, says: this is what my memory
insists on; this is what my memory will not let go; these
points of memory make me who I am, and al that others find
incomprehensible about me is explained by what’s in here.
I need to say that I don’t care about being understood; I want
my work to exist on its merits and not on the power of personality or celebrity. I have done this book
