Add a Story to the list!

[lb_lee]

If you have a story you want to add to the list, leave it in the comments below! Anyone can do this; you don't need an account!

This catalog purposely takes a very broad, ambiguous view of what constitutes "plural." Make our day! Story types that have been accepted in the past include:
* Spirit possession
* Imaginary friends
* Spirit marriage
* Exploring geographies of the mind, imagination, and fiction
* Bodysharing symbiotes
* MPD/DID
* Plural stories
* Telepathic bodyhopping shenanigans

Rules for submission (changed 5/17/2024):

• Only submit stories. We're willing to play with what defines a story, especially for personal experience accounts and experimental work, but self-help, philosophy, 101 and such do not belong here.
• Don't submit your own work. Boost your fellows!
• Please do not submit more than four titles by the same creator/s. When this archive gets bigger, we'll expand how many entries one creator/s can have.
• The story must be made by an adult (or at least not easily identified as made by a minor). This is to prevent malicious submissions and harassment of kids.
• The story must be publicly available. No unrecorded LARPS, rare books, or stuff on account-locked websites.
• If incomplete, the story must at least have a decent stop point. No just-started webcomics, please! They may not endure!
• You must have taken in the whole story (or at least all that's available at the time of submission). This is for complete content warnings and stuff.
• Spirited/many-selvedness must be core to story or main character/s. If you can remove it from the work without the whole thing falling apart, then please do not recommend it. (If you're not sure, ask! Make our day!)
• You must say why it's worth plurals' time. It doesn't have to be good, exactly, but it's gotta be worth it. This is to avoid completionist spam.

Does the story qualify? Then submit it using the form below! (Feel free to use the tags page for pointers.)

[Title] by [Creator/s] ([genre] [medium], [year released])

"[insert a cool quote from the work here]"

Blurb:

Why is it worth your time?:

Plural/1+ Tags: Choose from the ones on the tag list, or add your own!

Content Warnings: please include spoilers! I have this comm set up so that individual posts have only plural tag spoilers (because that's what folks are here for!), while content warnings will be in the comments. That way, people who want to remain spoiler-free can read the post itself and be fine, and the people who want all the warnings can scroll down.

Accessibility Notes: See the tag list for examples. Also note how you can get it. Is it an easy library book? Has someone digitized it and put it elsewhere? Is it backed up anywhere?

Misc. Notes (if any):

Is it long, medium, or short?: I wrote the standards here.

It is for kids, teens, adults, or everybody?

Comments

[erinptah]

So I heard about this book in a conversation that had nothing to do with DID, looked it up, and thought, "hang on, this sounds kinda plural." Got it out of the library, started reading, and went to "welp, I am definitely doing a pluralstories writeup for this" in about 5 seconds.

And I finished it earlier today, so here we go!

(Some of the marketing presents it as a self-help book, but it's 98% memoir, with a few pages of "discussion questions" and "here's how you, too, can write letters to yourself" at the end.)


White Girl Within by Dr. Ronnie Gladden (memoir, book, 2023)


I thought I had this down, you know. I would always be the aloof and inaccessible conjoined twin, the shadowy passenger to your outer life. But now I’m triggered. The revolution is on. More people are coming out and singing their songs. I want to belt out my part before we eddy into eternity.

Blurb (from Goodreads): Two identities struggle to coexist in Ronnie Gladden's body, brain, and soul. On the outside, they are Black and male. Inside, a repressed White female identity begs for release and is ready to break the status quo. Grappling with double-binary thinking, an abusive father, and childhood trauma, they imprison their inner self to stay safe from the world.

Why is it worth your time?: A plural memoir unlike any other I've ever read. A series of letters between Ronnie and his headmate (only identified as White Girl, or WG); although both of them identify Ronnie as the core/original, WG's perspective gets significantly more page time. They don't struggle with amnesia or time loss; it seems they've both been aware of each other since WG's appearance at age 4, the struggle is about validating each other and learning to coexist. Possibly the most in-depth reflection on "our physical body has one race, but this system member has a different one" in existence to date.

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse intermediate-focus, creator speaks from experience, people: imaginary friends, relationships: teamwork

Content Warnings: Descriptions of physical, emotional, and/or racist abuse, as well as alcoholism and racial violence.

Not really sure how to warn for this one, but, Ronnie and WG talk about their experience of race in ways that might raise some eyebrows. (Simple example: lots of waxing poetic about Ronnie's darkness vs. WG's light.) And, well, sometimes they're just objectively wrong about a thing. (Another simple example: they have a moment of daydreaming that Elon Musk might build tech to help with WG's dysphoria, apparently unaware that Musk openly hates trans people.) This isn't to discredit the book as a whole! It's just something I would feel weird about not acknowledging in the writeup.

Accessibility Notes: Print and digital/ebook versions available. Published in 2023, so new copies are easy to get (or have your library get).

Misc. Notes (if any): I didn't tag "type: medical" because Ronnie/WG don't use any psychiatric/DID-related terms in the memoir. (Not clear whether they've actively rejected the diagnosis, or whether they've never come across it in the first place, so they haven't had a chance to consider it.) But the experiences they describe are a typical DID origin story, of a child in an abusive household whose brain instinctively generates headmate(s) for coping and protection.

I'm not sure whether to tag dreamfolk/fictioneers, because none of those are described as full-fledged headmates the way WG is. But they write about internalizing fictional/TV characters pretty intensely ("you—we—brought these characters along in the same way most go and buy clothes"), and transcribe some "dream scene" conversations between them. Wouldn't be surprising if a future memoir said "we now realize those were from a roundtable of fictives having a chat."

Is it long, medium, or short?: Long (366 print pages)

It is for kids, teens, adults, or everybody? Teens and up

[lb_lee]

Oh wow, I'd never heard of this! And my local library has it, I'll have to check this out! Thanks for this submission, this is absolutely a good find!

EDIT: oh, and er, added it to the catalog. ^_^;