Bri Fidelity’s Reviews > Mind of My Own: The Woman Who Was Known As "Eve" Tells the Story of Her Triumph over Multiple Personality Disorder > Status Update

'Admittedly, researchers have determined that less than 10% of all MPD patients have the disorder as the result of indirect trauma outside themselves[.] But [...] what [could] the many popular, but bizarrely violent, movies and television shows doing to the preschoolers of this nation today? Unfortunately we may not know the definitive answers until they become young adults around the year 2000.'

Although Sizemore never successfully gets to meet 'Sybil' (Wilbur fields her away: 'Sybil sees no-one[;] not even you, Chris [...] that's the way it is.') her fundraising and spokespersoning bring her into contact with many of the post-Sybil multiples, including Truddi Chase ('Two, four, six, eight. I don't wanna integrate[.]'). These Eve-among-the-Sybils stories just feel odd somehow.

'Ultimately, however, the responsibility for all my alters' actions lies with me. As the birth personality, I had unconsciously chosen to be beyond awareness [...] so I believe that, even though MPD patients are certainly mentally ill, they should not use the insanity defence because their disorder is, in a sense, a willed negligence of responsibility for their own lives.'

'Those were deaths,' Chris tells her doctor, 'because those alters were alive. I have worn their clothes. I have read their wills. [...] What's more, if I'm the only person who created them, then why am I not solely responsible for their deaths? That's why I keep saying "I killed them". And I will not permit another one to emerge, because I'll have to kill her too. I intend to survive.'

'My life had become as silent as four in the morning[.]'

'I was remembering the way normal people described the process. I was merely thinking in words, rather than recalling in images. / It was a peculiar revelation[.] I finally understood that normal persons do not remember exclusively in flickering images, the way MPD patients do. Normal people remember in a complex, intricate manner that involves words and feelings as well as [...] odours, sounds and images.'

'The other day Don said that I had used him. I told him that was strange because, looking back and recalling how he related to my alters, it seemed that he had used me, that he had secretly thrived on my illness and had gotten excitement from having so many different wives - even the ones who rejected him. Doctor, I now know that the man enjoyed a virtual harem in his bedroom[.]' BWAHhahaha!

'"That's it," I said, and Don looked at me with suspicion, as if he thought I was switching personalities again. "All these years you thought that when I got well, I would be Jane again."

'"She had a beautiful personality," he said in a faint voice, "but I didn't expect her to come back. I never remember any of them returning."'

Definite changes in the I'm Eve narrative here: the 'week of horror' Chris experienced in I'm Eve, reliving her long-repressed past, becomes six weeks; the two disturbing abreactions experienced by the Retrace Lady - the bad burn, and the surgery - are moved to this time, post-'unification'. The endnotes even, bafflingly, invite the reader to compare the two conflicting accounts.

'[Unification] meant the consistent end of not only the disorder but also of my retreat from responsibility for my own life. My alters wanted the disorder to end, but I don't think that I did[.] It was their choices and retreating that thrust me back onto centre stage, whether I wanted that emergence or not. The only other option at the time was for the body, devoid of a personality, to die[.]' What.