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

Jane Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1996

In this extraordinarily distinctive, exquisitely crafted memoir, one that began as a suicide note, Jane Phillips, a woman with "disassociative identity disorder" writes about the intimate details of her life. The Magic Daughter is a harrowing, moving, inspiring, and ultimately triumphant account of a woman's journey toward wholeness.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Published under a pseudonym, this book offers an account of a woman's struggle with dissociative identity disorder.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (October 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140244557
• ISBN-13: 978-0140244557
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,037,842 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent allegories to the chaotic thinking of the DID., August 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living with Multiple Personality Disorder (Paperback)

The author expressed comparative thinking of a person with DID with everyday examples. I identified with many of her expressions she wrote explaining the struggle to handle the DID while dealing with the outside world. Her explanations of how many inside parts can see a movie and interpret it in all different ways was a good definition of how so many parts can be created by just one incident. I am currently in therapy for DID and I was inspired by her ability to keep going on in therapy because the light to her recovery will come through soon. At times it was difficult to read through the graphic explanations of the trauma because of the experiences I have had and I could identify with the author's pain. I applaud her courage for sharing her life in this book. Thank you for printing it in paperback.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Profoundly moving, November 15, 2003

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living with Multiple Personality Disorder (Hardcover)

Most of us think of Multiple Personality Disorder in terms of 'Sybil,' or 'The Three Faces of Eve,' or that California serial killer who claimed the rest of him was innocent. To us, it's an exotic craziness that either doesn't exist or is sensationally unpredictable and dangerous.

Phillips, pseudonymous author of 'The Magic Daughter,' not only makes the disorder (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder) credible, she puts one scared and human face on it. Phillips' memoir began in April 1993 as a suicide note. But in trying to explain why life was too difficult to bear, she became absorbed in the project and it eventually became a means of integrating her "selves."

Phillips fits none of the stereotypes. She's a college professor whose students and colleagues are unaware of her disorder. She was considered thorough - because several selves would independently do her work, each needing to ensure it was done correctly - unbeknownst to Jane herself. She learned to cover when greeted by people she didn't remember. Nothing was more relaxing than hours spent gazing into the mirror, communing with a parade of faces, young, old, boyish, feminine, wise and foolish - none of which seemed to be hers. But just getting through a normal day could be exhausting as she fought to control conflicting emotions and maintain a moment to moment chronology.

Since junior high she had been secretly aware of something wrong. "Mostly I just never seemed to be who I really was - although I had no idea who that was." All through college, through marriage to an alcoholic, she thought of seeing a psychiatrist but all she could think to ask was "What's wrong with me? Why is life so hard?"

At 30, she finally sought help after a summer tormented by headaches, profound depression and uncontrollable bouts of terror and anger during which she tore out all the flowers in her beloved garden, carried a gasoline can to the house intending to burn the place down and spent hours in her closet crying because none of the clothes seemed to belong to her. But she was still, despite the psychologist's prodding, unable to express what she wanted out of therapy.

Probing her childhood, the therapist precipitated a wrench back in time. "Suddenly, weirdly, I was nine years old again." Out came memories - the anger and violence of her older brother, Hank, who had tormented his younger siblings. And attempted to rape his sister Jane, failing only because their parents arrived home unexpectedly. "I couldn't tell if I had remembered it or made it up."

Her brother's attacks and elaborate malice - much of it sexual - continued throughout her childhood. But there was another side to her home life. On both sides her family was overrun with boys. She was the girl all the adults had been waiting for. She was petted and loved and expected to rectify all the deficiencies of her mother's childhood. Failure to measure up was met with anger and recriminations. It was a turbulent, tormented childhood, but many children suffer worse horrors.

Multiplicity, says Phillips, has three main causes. The first is a predisposing brain chemistry, second is trauma and third is a lack of recognition or acceptance of that trauma by adults.

While she was recognized as dissociative early on, she was not diagnosed as a multiple until five years into therapy. Her memoir brings home to the reader how thin the line is between normal emotional turmoil and a fragmented personality. Even some of her truly bizarre symptoms, such as an inability to distinguish between current and remembered pain, or to explain symptoms before another personality takes over and the symptoms disappear, arouse empathy.

This passionate, harrowing journey towards self-understanding and, ultimately, integration, makes unusual demands on the reader. Perception is a solitary thing - Phillips believed for years that everyone had psyches like hers but other people were braver and smarter about life. It's not the fragments themselves that defy comprehension but the wholeness and separateness of them - the personalities that remain forever 5 or 15, personalities that know only fear or loneliness or anger. With this book, Phillips makes it possible to understand how she protected her core by snapping off bits of herself which then took on particular functions in daily life, setting up a cycle which made her days almost impossible to negotiate.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I Saw Myself in Her, August 21, 2001

By 

HouseofGhosts (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living with Multiple Personality Disorder (Hardcover)

Like only a handful of books written about multiplicity, this one was written by the multiple herself, rather than her therapist. However, unlike so many other multiple-written books, this one was actually decently composed. Which, after attempting such poorly-crafted tomes as I'm Eve and Prism, was an enthusiastically received change.

The Magic Daughter also differs from other multiplicity books in one other, significant way. Though arranged in rough chronological order, this book is more a series of personal essays than an autobiography. While this is frustrating in one regard--in that not all "plot threads" are adequately resolved--it allows the writer to avoid rehashing less than interesting moments in her life and concentrate on the issues that she truly wants to handle.

Although I know multiples who truly hated this book, I enjoyed it highly. On numerous occasions, I found myself reflected in its pages. I was easily able to identify with passages such as:

"Life is hard! I want to shriek. My head aches, my mind roars with voices, I have no extra money, I'm exhausted, and I can barely think straight. I scream in the night, my body aches with remembered abuses, and therapy requires that I recall and then relive those old, horrifying traumas."

Perhaps if she had focused on the happier moments of multiplicity, her story may have been more endearing to empowered multiples. To her, however, multiplicity is something that needs to be cured, though she does acknowledge it may have causes completely unrelated to abuse.

"I suddenly felt unnerved. Her therapist was a man who'd made a substantial name for himself because of his work with abuse survivors; he often lectured and offered workshops. For some reason, I blurted out that I'd been multiple three, maybe four years before I was sexually abused." (Italics mine.)

Sadly Phillips does not deal with natural multiplicity for more than a few paragraphs. Perhaps such an exploration would have been out of place in this book, which is focused more or the end of multiplicity than its beginnings. It does not end happily with integration, though. While Phillips does make inroads towards that goal in the final half of the book, she is only at the start of the process when the book ends, with much work still ahead of her.

How she handles integration may make many multiples wary. She simply decides to stop dissociating, that she's had enough. It's not that cut and dried, but that is the brunt of it. And, as she is seen in this book very much as the core personality, she believes that she can simply stop, much as one can stop chewing their nails. Multiplicity is simply a more elaborate and debilitating habit.

And that's where she'll lose a lot of multiples, especially those that truly love and care for their system mates. Still, whether or not I agree with her, I enjoyed reading about her opinions and struggles. The book was very well constructed and a fast read. With that in mind, I'd recommend it, though it may drive some empowered, non-trauma-based multiples crazy.