Only a few people knew I was multiple: my spouse, my therapist, my oldest friend.

Words Count | Lilian Nattel

Writing with Dissociative Identity Disorder

Do you value every aspect of yourself? Every inch of your body? It isn’t easy, is it?

When I told my first agent—and this is the reason she was my first and isn’t my current agent—that I’d been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple personalities), she said, “You can’t write by committee.”

She had represented me on my historical fiction novels, but I was now working on my first contemporary fiction—about a mother with DID. Excited, I’d sent her a piece of the first draft.

She objected to the piece as unrealistic because the main character has three children. Anyone with DID, my agent said firmly, authoritatively, as if she was the expert on this, couldn’t possibly cope with more than one.

Only a few people knew I was multiple: my spouse, my therapist, my oldest friend. There were also a couple of new friends I’d first met in an anonymous, online support group who were multiple, too, and we’d progressed to talking on the phone, sharing the names under which we operated in the world, and eventually meeting in person.