BRAIN STORM

In Kolton’s debut memoir, the doctor details her struggles with dissociative identity disorder.

Dissociative identity disorder—or DID—is better known to many by its former name: multiple personality disorder. In cases of extreme childhood trauma, the mind can create alternate identities in order to cope. Outwardly, Shelley Kolton was the picture of stability. She had three children, a loving partner, and a successful OB-GYN practice in New York. Inwardly, she was suffering panic attacks, blackouts, and horrifying flashbacks to events in her childhood that she wasn’t sure ever took place. After years in various forms of therapy, she finally began working with social worker Yael Sank, who specialized in caring for trauma patients. With Yael’s help, Kolton discovered she contained within her mind 31 distinct personalities, which Kolton calls her “alters.” They had names like Little Girl, Denier, Hate/Raven, and Joey. Through them, Kolton was able to unearth the truth of her childhood: serial abuse at the hands of the cult members who lived next door to her when she was a child. The memoir is an account of Kolton’s treatment, during which, over the course of many years, she was able to peel back the veils of her many alters and get to the real story behind the girl who created them. Kolton’s prose is taut and tension filled, as here where she returns to her childhood home to investigate her former neighbors’ house: “I climbed down a ladder and into a small basement room with a boiler and a dangling light bulb. The dirt floor crunched under my feet, and when I lit a match, the ladder came into focus. It had eight rungs. The scene was exactly as I had drawn it.” The book makes for a difficult read at times; both the abuse Kolton suffered and her accounts of her dissociations are quite disturbing. Nevertheless, the memoir offers a remarkable window into DID and its treatment. (Kolton now considers herself “largely recovered.”) Tying in threads of feminism, lesbianism, and motherhood, the book is an intriguing meditation on the labyrinthine workings of the human mind as well as the dedication required to overcome the traumas of childhood.

A probing, surprising mental health memoir.