I’ve been working my way through the library’s collection of audiobooks by Cathy Glass, a long-time foster carer in the UK who writes about her experiences with different kids over the years. So here’s a post about some of those.
Most of them have really generic titles (“Cut“, “Neglected“, “A Terrible Secret”, “Girl Alone“, you get the picture), but the actual writing is detailed and engaging. She comes off like exactly the kind of person you’d want in this job: thoughtful and attentive, firm about setting boundaries but patient and tolerant with some pretty gnarly issues, detail-oriented enough to adapt to the new batch of paperwork and scheduling (so much scheduling!) that every case dumps on her. (Obviously this could just be her talking herself up, but I’ll be an optimist and hope it’s true.)
The overall foster system fails these kids in various ways on a regular basis, but there is some comfort if you jump around in the timeline, you see how much it improves over the years. The first book I read was I Miss Mummy, where Cathy’s oldest son is 14, and there are all these procedures and check-ins and reports. Then I jumped back to Cut, where the son is an infant and the kid is her second foster charge ever — and wow, a social worker basically just rolls up to her house and goes “here, this is your problem now.”
Had an attack of morbid curiosity, and decided to read this book.
(It’s the big exposé of how Sybil, supposedly a therapy memoir that became one of the most-publicized cases of MPD/DID, was a pack of lies. Discussion of trauma and medical/therapy abuse ahead.)
…It would be better titled Sybil’s Psychiatrist Exposed, because that’s the heart of the problem. And, listen, props to the book for understanding that! Because I’ve seen similar things try to blame the patients, but this never left me feeling like “Shirley Ann Mason’s doctor drugged, manipulated, and controlled her in all kinds of ways” was supposed to be anyone’s fault except the doctor’s.
One thing that really stuck out, though. The writer, Debbie Nathan, comes down on the side of DID itself being a sham…but she did a ton of in-depth research on Mason, including personal interviews with people who knew her growing up…and she includes anecdotes like this:
Soon imaginary friends started visiting Shirley—Vicky, whose family was Catholic but gentle and honest, and little Sam, whose name came from Shirley’s initials: S.A.M. Immersed in fantasies, she forgot the long, grim hours of her family’s day of rest. While still in her fantasy world, she often heard scolding outside. It came from [her mother] Mattie, who was angry that Shirley had just done or said something objectionable. Shirley came to, unable to remember doing anything wrong. “I did not!” she would protest, and Mattie grew angrier. “I stood right there and heard you, young lady!” she would yell, and warn Shirley about “talking back to your mother like that.” Shirley would slink off, confused and angry. Her parents would laugh at her “pouting.” (10)
Would Mason have gotten a DID diagnosis after all, if she was being treated in 2025 by a qualified, ethical therapist? No way to know.
Did she have some kind of Dissociative Thing going on, that existed long before she met Dr. Wilbur, and that a qualified, ethical psychiatrist could’ve helped her with? Sure sounds like yes!
(Bonus note: There are cases of Dr. Wilbur elevating things like “Mason having mood shifts without describing herself as a separate person” into “actually, surprise, that’s a new alter you just got.” But Nathan didn’t find evidence of that being the case for the first few. Peggy Lou and Vicky both spontaneously showed up to appointments in place of Shirley, and introduced themselves.)
The big memorable feature of Sybil-the-book is the all the abuse, recounted in lurid graphic detail, which Mason supposedly recovered during sessions of being dosed with sodium pentothal. Some sessions were taped; Sybil Exposed includes some transcripts. There’s a painful amount of Dr. Wilbur just going “I bet that symptom means your mother did X. When did she do X? Now, did she also do Y? Ah, you said a couple vague words, that’s a description of how your mother did Y.”
So that’s awful.
And: when Nathan is writing up her fact-based, well-corroborated alternate account of Mason’s childhood…she talks about things that sound genuinely painful, even traumatic! There’s a harrowing experience of being restrained and sedated at the dentist, there’s religious abuse, there are deaths in her close family, her mother has some kind of undiagnosed-but-severe Depression Thing, she herself has chronic physical symptoms from a vitamin deficiency that doesn’t get properly treated for decades.
Would all that have left the adult Mason with ongoing trauma-induced dissociation? Maybe, maybe not. Would it have left her with some messy emotional struggles that an ethical psychiatrist could’ve helped her work through? Probably, yeah!
I bet it even would’ve made a good, compelling, highly-readable memoir.
It just wouldn’t have made Sybil. Which means it wasn’t salacious enough, or profitable enough, for this terrible, terrible doctor.
I was really hoping to. As a detailed historical snapshot of “how the mental-health profession thought of dissociation in 1905”, it’s fascinating. I’m still not over the reveal of “one headmate claims they were plural as a toddler, and the doctor thinks that can’t be right, because that’s so implausibly young to start splitting.”
But as a record of the treatment of this particular patient — it’s really depressing. Gave me the same feeling I had reading The Third Person (Emma Grove’s 2022 graphic memoir, summary with content warnings on pluralstories), where you start out thinking “okay, this therapist doesn’t know what he’s dealing with and is clearly in over his head, but he seems thoughtful and open to learning, so maybe he’ll get better”…and by the end it’s just a constant escalation of “no, buddy, what are you doing, this is so obviously bad for your patient, oh noooo.”
Extra-frustrating because this book is written by the therapist, and…he notices! A few times he mentions having misgivings, or second-guessing whether he’s doing the right thing! And then he’ll talk himself right back into doing more of it.
There’s also a point where, in talking about teenage headmate Sally, he refers to “her true function — if she had one, which may be doubted” (405). My good sir, your own writing recounts multiple instances of Sally giving you key information that the other headmates were unaware of, and of her physically taking care of their body, including thwarting another headmate’s suicide attempt! You should be first in line to defend this girl as an essential protector, no matter how many obnoxious pranks or immature insults she pulls in between! Justice for Sally, dammit.
(Double-plus-frustrating because he’s the same doctor who treated the system in My Life As A Dissociated Personality, and it seemed like they had a really healthy, positive experience! Apparently that only happens if the patient’s therapeutic goals and attitudes line up with his own from the start. If not…disaster.)
—
I started writing this post back at the beginning of the book, because on the fourth page, the author just casually threw out the names of a half-dozen other previously-studied dissociative patients. More of them come up throughout the text, so I kept the draft open. Wanted to track down sources for as many as I could.
I didn’t come across this book in any kind of DID-related context — it was a conversation about trans issues, this author reportedly identifies as transgender and transracial — but reading the title/summary of White Girl Within, I thought “huh, this sounds kinda plural.”
And then I got the ebook from the library, and spent the whole thing like the interviewer in this one meme, except I’m thinking “Sir are you aware you are a system?”
The whole memoir is an extended dialogue between two people sharing a body, they address each other as “you” and refer to themselves collectively as “we”, and yet somehow it never comes up? They try all these different lenses and frameworks to understand their situation — the trans experience, the history of American race relations, analogies to a whole library of plays and TV shows — but they never mention DID, even to say “we looked into this and decided it doesn’t fit us”??
(It was published in 2023, they’re active on social media, but it would be weird to ask them directly, right??)
(I wrote up an entry about it for pluralstories, if you want more of a summary + content warnings. Diagnosis notwithstanding, their experience is so clearly in the Plural-Ish Ballpark.)
—
This only briefly comes up in the book, but Ronnie and WG believe Rachel Dolezal is a Legitimate Transracial Person. And there’s a Netflix documentary about her, which in turn has a brief appearance by Ronnie. So I ended up watching that next.
Some backstory, which goes by pretty quickly in the doc, but which I didn’t osmose at all when she was actually in the news: Rachel was abused by her white bio-parents for as long as she could remember, her white brother was the golden child who supposedly deserved everything she didn’t, and she also had four black adopted siblings who didn’t have such a hot time either.
She was conditioned, in traumatic ways, from the day she was born, to bond and identify with her black relatives. While being profoundly unsupported by her white relatives. There’s a moment where an interviewer asks something like, if she would “go back” to being white, and she says — I went back and looked it up, it’s at the very end — “I’m never going to be that [young] white girl in Montana again…I’m not going to subject myself to the punishment of my parents all over again.”
(Ronnie’s headmate, drawing a similar connection about his abusive childhood, though she seems a lot more self-aware about it: “Would your dad have beat a young girl? Would he have beaten a young White girl?”)
I don’t know if “transracial” is the right word for what all that did to Rachel’s brain. I’m definitely not here to say she should be running a chapter of the NAACP about it.
And she’s not doing herself any favors to give a bunch of interviews saying “gosh, anyone could do this, no reason why not, race is just a social construct anyway!”
But, oof, it doesn’t seem weird to think that changed something deep and foundational in her psyche, something she can’t just shake off.
—
Ending this post with something a little nicer! And a lot older.
“My life as a dissociated personality” (digitized on the Internet Archive) is a 1909 therapy memoir about exactly what it sounds like. (Didn’t see it on pluralstories at a quick glance, but LB, I’m sure I got this link from y’all.)
Thinking back on their experience after some fusion, they recall “A” and “B” having different outlooks, tastes, reading preferences, socialization habits. We get excerpts from the journals where they got around amnesia barriers by writing to each other! Fascinating how recognizable it is — including the use of terms like “dissociated personality” and “co-conscious”, in what sure looks like the same way they’re still used today.
At first, the preface from their therapist describes the “A complex” and “B complex”, but the prose quickly switches to calling these “personalities.” Later, they try to reconstruct a personal timeline, and decide that a “B complex” existed in some form since a traumatic incident at a young age, but only “flowered” into the full “B personality” some 20 years later, triggered by the sudden fatal illness of their husband.
It’s short, less than 50 pages if you don’t count the endpaper/title page/etc, and has a really clear, easy-to-understand writing style. Would recommend. (Especially to whip out the next time you hear someone claim DID was made up by Sibyl/Tumblr/TikTok.)
…is bringing the wildest takes out of the woodwork, I swear.
“Why does he need a million dollars?” Buddy, making each book costs money, and he knew a lot of people like his books. If one book is $10 to print and ship, and his readers preorder 100,000, there’s $1 million already. That’s just math.
As of this writing, he has almost 150,000 backers. Lots of them are getting multiple books! Some are getting merch! All of that has production costs.
“Why doesn’t he use a publishing company?” He’s been using publishing companies for 20 years. Now he OWNS a publishing company. That’s…probably how he knows how much books cost.
Any publisher would also be taking a million in preorders, btw.
(Probably more. Sanderson’s website says the number of people ordering the new books through his campaign is much lower than the numbers he’s used to getting through Tor.)
“Why doesn’t he use a POD service?” You get that readers still have to pay for the books, right…?
Even if you didn’t keep any profit to pay your own staff (and, uh, keep your own lights on), the POD company is still taking a profit! Guess which path is ultimately more expensive for the book-buyers?
Also, POD services are optimized for authors who sell 1 book at a time. Maybe 10 if we’re lucky.
A print run for an NYT bestseller? Would straight-up break their machines.
My toaster oven is great at making 1 burger for my lunch. Doesn’t mean I should walk into McDonald’s and say “lol, why do you guys bother having an industrial-grade fryer??”
“Maybe he could use that money to support other authors!” The backers didn’t pay for books by other authors. They paid for Sanderson books.
So…you think he should commit mass consumer fraud?
Orrrrr he could produce and send everyone the products they ordered! What a concept.
…and, for a different flavor of wild take, “This shows how much success an indie author can have!”
No, this shows how much success a Hugo-winning, NYT-bestselling, 20-year mainstay of mainstream SFF publishing can have. (Again, the crowdfunding total is a downgrade from what he’s used to getting.) Presenting this as a typical or realistic indie experience is bonkers.
Look, I don’t begrudge Sanderson his success. His readers are getting books they like! This is a good thing.
Just don’t go “so inspiring! See, this means anyone can get this level of preorders. All you need is a bit of hustle and a few more podcast bookings.”
That’s not how it works. And we don’t have to pretend like it is. There are actual reasons to find this happy and uplifting — we don’t need to make stuff up, I promise.
There’s a thing I regularly hear people say about Terry Pratchett, even across wildly different contexts…
“Was he always perfectly sensitive about my identity? No. Would he even really understand my life and experiences? Probably not. But if I got to sit down and talk with him, it feels like he would genuinely listen. And take what I said to heart. And support my right to live an authentic and fulfilling way, whether he got it or not.”
Life goals, seriously. I can only hope readers in 50+ years will be saying the same about me.
N.K. Jemisen, 2013: “All mythological creatures have a real-world root. Dryads are trees + humans + magic. Mermaids are fish + humans + magic, or maybe porpoises + magic. Unicorns are deer or horses + magic, maybe with a bit of narwhal glued on. Dragons are reptiles + magic, or maybe dinosaur bones + magic – paleontology. So again: what are orcs supposed to be?”
Tamsyn Muir is doing a whole extra Locked Tomb novel. We're getting a 4-part trilogy, folks. Can't think of another ongoing series I'd be happier to hear it for.
One of my bookshelves started, uh, literally bowing down in the middle because of all the weight on it. So I figured I should take a stab at clearing it off.
All of these are free, but please PayPal me the shipping cost if you can. (Probably $3-$5 within the US, unless you want a really heavy stack of books.)
All in good-to-great physical condition unless otherwise noted. First come, first serve!
Comics
Little Orphan Annie, volume 1: Massive hardcover, the complete first 2 years' worth of daily strips
Garfield: 20 Years & Still Kicking: Slightly less massive hardcover, slightly scuffed, anniversary compilation (now itself 20 years out of date), lots of favorite strips, making-of details, behind-the-scenes sketches, etc
Serenity Rose, book 1: Paperback, the spooky webcomic about a gay socially-anxious witch (I'm only giving this away because I got the 3-book massive hardcover compilation)
Angelarium: Little paperback, mostly-wordless sketchbook of super-weird angel designs
Miles Between Us, #1: Little saddle-stitched issue, odd little self-published fantasy, artist-drawn doodle on the inside front cover
Masquerade, #1-4 (not shown, but it's this series): Four saddle-stitched issues, the revival edition of 1940's "no powers, just wits and a snazzy coat" hero Miss Masque
Digger, volumes 1-3: Three paperbacks, the Hugo-winning webcomic about a lost wombat (another series where I've supplanted these with the all-in-one compilation)
The Hasty Pastry #1: Paperback, brightly-colored webcomic about retail comedy
The Thrilling Adventure Hour: Hardcover, comic supplement to the podcast, might contradict your appearance headcanons but otherwise charming
Sailor Moon, Volume 1 (first Kodansha translation): Manga, very obscure series about some teenage girl who fights monsters or whatever
Comics & books in French
Bilbo Le Hobbit, volume 1: Hardcover graphic-novel adaptation of The Hobbit, through the arrival at Beorn's place
Bone, volumes 1-2: Two paperbacks, adventures of the lost Fone Bone and family, through the Great Cow Race
McKay, volumes 1-3 (not shown, but it's from this title): Tall hardcovers, weird historical RPF about Winsor McKay discovering the fourth dimension, Little Nemo features on the cover but makes very few appearances inside
Les 52 Mercredis de L'A2: Hardcover, lightly scuffed, apparently one French company got ahold of a bunch of disconnected international IPs -- including Tom Sawyer, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Candy Candy, and Spectreman -- and decided they should all go in the same compilation
Le Petit Prince: Paperback, another totally unknown title but I promise it's pretty good
Comedy nonfiction
Me of Little Faith: Hardcover, Lewis Black writes funny things
More Information Than You Require: Hardcover, John Hodgman writes funny things
The Kid: Paperback, Dan Savage writes about his experience adopting a kid as a gay couple
Naked Pictures of Famous People: Paperback, lightly scuffed, Jon Stewart's first attempt at writing funny things
The Daily Show's 5 Questions: Paperback, lightly scuffed, super-vintage Daily Show questions for late-'90s celebrities
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