Having engaged successfully with the psychiatric institution, Sizemore may be ready for her current entanglement — with the law. Some years ago Sissy Spacek, the actress, expressed a desire to make a film of Sizemore’s life since The Three Faces of Eve. But Twentieth Century Fox has refused to allow the project to go forward, insisting that the studio owns the rights to Sizemore’s life story, which Sizemore, at the time the movie was made, signed over to them. To add to the obvious irony of a fight to own her life story—“claiming my own history”—is the injury that might have been done to her by the psychiatrists who negotiated the contract for her, when they stood to gain as much if not more from it than she.
Sizemore’s legal argument is that one of her alters, Jane, signed the contract, and that she was not yet cured of her illness. When it comes to trial, the case will most likely rest upon the issue of her competence at that time. But in A Mind of My Own Sizemore may have logically contradicted her own defense. Asked by the FBI, in February 1982, to evaluate the case of Kenneth Bianchi — the serial murderer known as the Hillside Strangler, who claimed to have MPD — she recounts her position (she thought he was a fake) and also her feelings about the “not guilty by reason of insanity” plea. As to whether a person with MPD “could have determined right from wrong” and “be held responsible for those acts,” Sizemore answers, “Unlike schizophrenics, MPD patients do not lose touch with reality, and most of their alters can tell right from wrong. So, yes, I believe he should have been held responsible for his acts.” Should Sizemore now be held responsible for the act of a competent alter? Or was that alter incompetent? What’s true?
If Chris Sizemore’s story reads as much like fiction as “real life,” it may be because truth or reality isn’t opposed to fiction. Sizemore’s “cases” pose truth itself as a complex of representations whose interpretations will always be informed by the institutions that define reality. And Reality and its fraternal twin, Representation, undergo continuous overhaul. Sizemore’s struggles within different discourses are played out on a broad field where the battle over, and the critique of, representation is waged. That current field includes movies such as Everybody Wins, in which Debra Winger’s character flips from one personality to another — raunchy prostitute, wholesome do-gooder, pedantic sadist. Her romantic partner, Nick Nolte, doesn’t know what’s hit him, along with the audience, which is elliptically clued in, an hour into the film, that Winger’s character is more than just whimsical. But her “craziness” is never referred to as MPD or indeed named anything at all. The representation of an unnamed disorder fuses with familiar fantasies and fears of women, conjuring psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s “femininity as masquerade” (discussed in her essay “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” 1929) as the horror-movie theme of the ’90s. Sizemore might be horrified by this casual usage of MPD, where personality changes become just so many plot points.
“Everybody wins” certainly won’t be the outcome of her court case, as it probably won’t be the conclusion to the struggle for representation itself.
J is for Jokes
Let’s Vote on It
Tompkins Square Park was the site of a tree-planting ceremony in honor of Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg lived on East Tenth Street, bordering the park, for 30 years before his death in 1997. I went, even though I was, and still am, ambivalent about him. Thirty people were there. One of the poets who organized the event took the mike. He started to talk about Ginsberg; the tree planted for him; Ginsberg’s name on a plaque; and the importance of Tompkins Square for the neighborhood. A woman standing on the sidelines screamed: “Allen would’ve hated this, he would’ve hated what’s happened to the park.” In 1989, the park was closed for more than a year, maybe two, after the City forcibly evicted squatters and homeless people from it. There was a terrible, violent confrontation, and, ever since it reopened, cleaned up and refurbished, the police surround the park every May Day, expecting trouble. The poet tried to continue, but the woman kept shouting, then demanded to speak at the mike. “Let her,” someone yelled. “Get her out of here,” someone else yelled. Quickly, the organizers decided we’d all vote on it: three minutes, yea or nay. She got them. I couldn’t stay and left thinking how democratic it all was, how right that a worthy ceremony turned into a fractious happening, an existential monument to Ginsberg. It was complicated and funny, too, like living inside a New York joke: “A Jew, an Irishman, and a black man walk into a bar. The bartender says: Is this a joke?”
Try Again
I gave a fiction reading with the poet Matthea Harvey at New York University’s Lillian Vernon House, which lodges its creative writing program. At the end, we took questions. The last to me was: “What would you tell younger writers is the most important lesson you’ve learned so far in your writing life?” The next night I dined with a friend who’s an artist. He and I discussed how — and whether — to answer questions about our work: “I’ve said I believe in something, an idea or cause,” he said, “then someone in the audience says, ‘But I don’t see that in your work.’”
No one strong-arms you into becoming an artist or writer — most often you’re dissuaded — and volunteers who bemoan their chosen gig seem disingenuous. Visual artists are often called to account for their choices and asked to defend their positions. Few occupations other than finance, politics and crime entail this reckoning. Writers and artists may ask themselves why they make art or write, and many feel the pointlessness of their self-chosen jobs, but all rebuttals and answers to their existential questions rest on faith in Art or Literature. Faith itself will be tested.
Art and literary projects regularly fail, but the announcement of mistakes or failures is rare. There’s no written history of these failures, unless artists record them. In art, mistakes can be happy, revelatory surprises. Failures are also intriguingly resisted, by people who keep on trying. My dermatologist has researched a cure for cancer for 40 years. At 82, he appears undaunted, but then he is one of many scientists engaged in cancer research. This commonality of purpose and group effort doesn’t pertain in the arts. The field primarily supports individual achievement at the cost of a general goal, like a cure for cancer. But pursuing a common goal for art would be misguided.
A comic gets rid of bad jokes, or is a bad comic, though failures might make it into the act, since they’re at the heart of funny. Comedy wouldn’t exist without failure, especially that of other people. Writers may publish idiocies and artists make dull objects, and some of this work may be celebrated as good writing or art. Some write more and more books, hoping to get it right, often digging a deeper hole to fall into. Success itself can be a rut, since, it’s said, it breeds success, so might condemn an artist to doing the same thing forever.
To the question about my best lesson for younger writers, I answered: “Don’t expect that being published will make you happy.” I didn’t mention the inevitability of rejection, luck, money, nepotism, etc. Before my first novel appeared, I’d naively believed that being published would compensate for every bad thing. In those pre-publication days, my writing was for me, I was its only reader, and I could believe it was without sin.