The Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living with Multiple Personality Disorder

In a memoir that began as a suicide note, the author describes her day-to-day struggles with multiple personalities and her years of therapy with a psychologist who helped her piece together her past. 30,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.

After several years of intensive psychotherapy, French professor Jane Phillips (a pseudonym) was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder (MPD), a little-understood condition believed to result from childhood trauma. Faced with unpleasant situations, Phillips explains, a child chemically predisposed to dissociate will create multiple selves as a coping device. An incest survivor, Phillips has long been host to a multitude of personae "because one self could not cope with all there was to be coped with." Here she offers a frank and articulate account of how the disorder has shaped her daily life and of her struggle to achieve integration?the process whereby various selves coalesce into a single, stable identity. At times painful to read, this memoir yields compelling insights into the difficulties of confronting and overcoming a debilitating disorder. The author's persistent determination not to let MPD thwart a successful career or become the defining force in her life is inspirational.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

" Jane Phillips" is the pseudonym of a college professor and award-winning author who has lived with multiple personality disorder (MPD) for more than three decades. She recounts in sensitive, sometimes searing prose a childhood of secret terrors and abuse by three older brothers who resented her, the "magic daughter," the long-awaited girl child who dissociated in order to deal with the violence threaded throughout the fabric of her youth. Later in this memoir that she says began as a suicide note, Phillips details her everyday hardships as an adult. She must repeatedly regrade students' papers because one personality cannot remember the activities of another. Large chunks of life she cannot recall, and inexplicable illnesses and terrors drive her to the brink of self-destruction. She must play out a battle to live stably without medication against a backdrop of mental "noise" from her several identities. Phillips' stirring testimony deserves wide readership among the general public, not just specialists in behavioral disorders. Whitney Scott

Since Sybil and Three Faces of Eve, a flood of information on multiple personality disorder (MPD) has surged into the public view. Here, an award-winning writer and French professor writing under the pseudonym Phillips leads the reader into an intimate portrayal of her life with many voices. Her story began as a suicide note but became a tool in her struggle to succeed and overcome all the dysfunction, violence, and degradation in her early life. She offers a chronological reading of growing up with MPD and describes her eight years of work with a remarkable psychologist, resulting in the reintegration of her "selves." Her personalities are collectively known as "The Kids," who demand coloring books, stuffed animals, and a nightlight. There are other titles in this area, of course, such as Trudi Chase's When Rabbit Howls (Jove, 1990) and Gene Stone's Little Girl Fly Away (LJ 3/1/94). But this poignant memoir by a gifted author is well recommended for all collections.?Lisa Wise, Univ. of Southern Colorado, Pueblo
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.