I'M EVE

by Chris Costner & Elen Sain Pittillo Sizemore ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 1977

Joanne Woodward she's not-nor has Chris Sizemore's life resolved as neatly as the late-'50s Three Faces of Eve bestseller and movie that made ""multiple personality"" a household word. Since the supposedly successful emergence of that third, confident persona ""Jane,"" tortured, suicidal Chris has been The Blind Lady, The Bell Lady, The Purple Lady, The Virgin, The Retrace Lady, and The Strawberry Girl. And only recently, via time, therapy, and the writing of this memory-book, has any real ""integration"" been achieved. With her double-cousin and childhood playmate (a psychology Ph.D.), Mrs. Sizemore has summoned up recollections beginning at age ten-months, and surviving members of the rural South Carolina clan have filled in what the cousins can't recall. The result, written in the third person except for italicized sections of confused, sometimes hysterical self-analysis (""I still can't find me during any of this time!""), is a remarkably detailed, reasonably dispassionate life history and family scrapbook--with relatively few lapses into psychological jargon, sensationalism, or self-pity (""insufferable anxiety, intolerable depression, unbearable pain""). ""Nobody really knows what made me like this,"" Chris admits. Was it the early exposure to violent and untimely deaths (the first ""other girl"" appeared when two-year-old Chris viewed a drowned corpse) or perhaps the profusion of sibling rivalries that triggered the ""coping"" mechanism? Leaving the theorizing to others, the authors offer the decades of data: punishments for naughty, vicious acts committed by the big-eyed girl, the singing girl, or the freckle girl; fainting spells, blind spells, voices; ""marriage"" to an already-married sex-sadist; the illusion of a psychiatric ""cure"" and the frustrations of anonymous fame; first marriage to an oaf, second marriage to a patient but unsophisticated man; and the problematic joys of motherhood: ""Are you my mother, or are you that other one?"" Even with its occasional tedium, pervasive confusion, and still-blind spots of naivetÉ--and without the neat puzzle-solving or slick suspense of Sybil--this remains a compelling, unsettling document that tempers the 40 years of nightmare with common sense and dignity.

Pub Date: July 15, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1977

Categories: NONFICTION