Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls

by Matt Ruff

“Crazy people don’t try to hide their crimes,” my father said. “He knows what he did was wrong, but he doesn’t want to face the consequences. That’s not insane. That’s selfish.”

I’ll have them outnumbered.” This is an old multiple’s joke,

Memory makes the difference. There are facts that everyone knows, but memories, and the feelings they evoke, are unique to individual souls. Memories can be described, but can never truly be shared; and knowledge that is bound up in especially strong memories can’t be shared either.

Statistically, the average multiple goes through something like eight psychiatrists before being correctly diagnosed.

You can smash a vase, bury it in the ground for twenty years, dig it up again, and piece it back together just fine. You can do that because a vase is dead to begin with, and its pieces are inert. But human souls aren’t made of porcelain. They’re alive, and, in the nature of living things, they change; and they keep on changing even after they get smashed to bits.

The Guide, by Dr. Danielle Grey (a local author, according to the sticker on the front cover), approached multiplicity as a condition to be managed, rather than as a pathology to be cured.

“The primary difficulty faced by multiple personalities,” Dr. Grey wrote in her preface, “is not that they are abnormal; it is that they are dysfunctional. Multiplicity, of itself, is no more problematic than left-handedness. Losing time, being unable to keep a steady job or maintain a residence, requiring detailed lists just to get through the day—these things are problems. But they are problems that a well-organized multiple household, acting cooperatively, can learn to overcome.”

“They aren’t mine,” Mouse protests. “Yes, they are. You called them out, to help you cope with something that was too terrible to handle all by yourself. And they’re still there, still trying to help you, mostly, but they’ve got their own needs and wants now, and that complicates things.”

“It’s crazy.” “No,” he says. “You could have gone crazy, with what your mother did to you. Or you could have turned mean, like the man at the diner. But you didn’t. You did something creative. And that’s great; only now you’re going to have to be even more creative, if you want to get your life together.”

There’s a type of protector soul, called a runner, whose function is to remove the body from threatening situations.

This was such a non sequitur that for a moment I was completely lost.

Mouse has begun to hear voices. Sometimes the voices are just whispers, like daydream thoughts that aren’t her own.

“All right,” Mouse addresses the figures who gather there, the Society members responding to her summons, “you tell me, whoever saw it…which way did he go?”

This touched my heart so muuuuuuuuch

The Pink Mammoth. Stupid fucking name,