DID Book Review
DID Book Review
Facts -
Book Title: Both of Me by Jonathan Friesen
Publication date: 2014
Fiction or Nonfiction: Fiction
Was there a diagnosis of DID? Yes
Was the person with DID presented as evil for having DID? Yes, in the twist ending
Major Trigger warning list:
Ableism all throughout (a lot of infantilism and the autistic savant trope, as well as generally written in a dehumanizing way)
Incarceration
Infant and parental death
Threatening with a gun
Plane crashing in the twist ending
Neglect
Physical abuse played off as a joke(? ‘she smacked him upside the head/across the face’)
Attempted sexual assault played off as romantic (Making out with the hesitant Elias, it’s written very vaguely and confusingly but I came away feeling like he couldn’t fully consent even if he wanted it)
Forced integration/forcing him to face his memories to integrate
Kidnapping? (In general it doesn’t seem like Elias has the ability to consent to most things despite being 19. His general confusion triggered my childhood..something sorta like kidnapping experiences so I’m adding this)
Sneaky Christian Messages (main character starts praying to God)
Subjective Review(this is how I felt about it) -
Personal triggering scale from 1 to 10 (1 being not triggering at all, 10 being a badly overwhelming experience that might cause personal harm): 5. It’s not explicit in any way but there were many points I just needed to put this down
Personal relatability scale from 1 to 10 (1 being unrelatable, 10 being OMG THAT’S ME!): 2
Personal avoidance scale from 1 to 10(1 being eager to get on with it, 10 being impossible to finish): 7
My interpretation of the media(Includes spoilers):
I think this book is garbage, let me tell you why.
The story follows our main character Clara, who after her mother’s death and her turning 18, fled her home in London to live an untethered life of travel. She left being Teeter and Marna(yes, those are their names) to live with their father, who had been incarcerated for the past ten years over an Incident that it only ever vaguely mentioned, and many times.
Clara is a stuck-up bitch. She’s written as if these are attractive and heroic traits, that she looks down on the people around her so much that she assigns them numbers instead of names, gets her fill of them, and flees to the next country. She’s evidently taken hundreds of trips around the world in the past year, funded entirely by scamming people into thinking they’re paying a charity to support the travels of other children of incarcerated parents. Not exactly a lie, but I found her scamming and making literally thousands like this to be disgusting. There’s only one person she ever trusts with the truth, and that’s her online friend, FFA
She’s going to New York.. Or Minneapolis. Actually I believe she’s on a flight from New York to Minneapolis when she meets Elias, an 18-19(?) year old boy who’s seated next to her in-flight. He’s handsome, but seems.. Off in a way. He’s huddled against the window sketching away, and she measures him up to be Dangerous To Her Personally because he seems.. Interesting. Someone she might be tangled with. Especially as he sketches away at a scene that must’ve been her own trauma.
After pestering him all flight, they part ways and he accidentally takes her identical-to-his bag. Clara has to track him down in Minneapolis(I believe) to retrieve it.
Elias lives in a big boarding house with his overprotective but also negligent mother, as well as a quirky cast of various old people who live there. The Elias Clara meets here is distinctly different from the Elias she met on the plane.. He’s.. Neurotypical and Nice.
She stays overnight and overhears the Quirky Cast Of Old People gambling on time to spend in Salem, Elias’ inner world. The way they do this I’m assuming is to trigger out the Savant Elias who talks about his Inner World while they hang out? Apparently, everyone can live their dream-lives there, like a couple who’s only married in Salem, or a couple of artists who are renowned in Salem. They’re explicitly using his DID for their own selfish reasons, and they’ve justified it with Well Everyones Happier In Salem! So they try to keep him in this ‘sick state’, trapped by his inability to care for himself in ways an adult should be able to(driving, being able to read, ect. Elias’ life doesn’t pass the burrito test)
To her credit, Clara thinks this is pretty fucked up and confronts Elias about it with a plan to force integration so he won’t have DID, and then no one can use him for Salem anymore. So she steals him away into the night after some weird exposition of… travelling into an active war zone and running into someone with leprosy…? (Forgive me, none of this makes any sense so it’s hard to remember.)
But she too has her own secret uses for Jason(This is the other side of Elias, he chose the name Jason. Even if Clara outright refuses to call him by his name, I will) She has to know how he Knows about the Terrible Thing She Did. Maybe she can force the truth out of him as well as force him to face all the trauma that split him in the first place. Even if Real Elias doesn’t seem entirely onboard, Jason declares Clara to be his guide, Clarita, and off they go.
Hijinks ensue. They have a big fight at a frat party. Clara forces her friend to sell her car to her with all the tens of thousands of dollars she scraped up with ‘charity’. They buy an airplane…? They go to all the towns named Salem. Clara has a moment of Clara-ty when FFA texts her to let her know that her siblings are ill and she needs to come home. She panics about being a bad person and using Elias and abandoning her family, and feels better about everything because she.. Slept in an old prison cell by choice. She makes up with Elias for abandoning him and urges him to get off his DID medication.
The next morning, Clara wakes up to find a gun to her head. It’s a girl named Izzy, who forces her way into their journey by threat. She’s going East like the rest of them. So theyyyy goooooo onnnn
They split up for a bit then come back together. It turns out all along FFA was her father! Clara has another spiral and lays in the road and I guess passes out. Izzy, who had taken the car (hooked up with the plane) came back for them and theyyy wentttt onnn theirrr way
Izzy comes to know Elias and actually doesn’t think of Jason as sub-human. She listens to all the heavy symbolism and substitute beliefs Jason has with Salem (They must stop the evil Lightkeeper to save the Queen and all of Salem) She offers her own input to help the journey along and speaks to him on the same level, compared to Clara, who’s been scoffing and making quips about how insane all this has been the whole time. It seems like Izzy really cares about both Elias and Jason compared to Clara(thE LOVE INTEREST), and she literally broke into all this by force and seemingly without a care for human life.
As they pull into the next Salem, the group decides to stay in a newly-bought house under the guise of all being siblings and moving in early for their father, in an attempt to fool the kind neighbors who let them in. I don’t really know why they made this up if they’re all adults anyway and had multiple chances to come clean about who they were, but they stuck to the sibling story, even when…
Clara lead “Her Elias(Real Elias)” upstairs to start making out with him. He.. Doesn’t seem like he wants to, is very polite and hesitant, and rather confused by the state of things. Even so, Clara… Pulls him into it…? It’s very vague and it doesn’t seem romantic to me in the least. Theres some entitlement from her because she ‘puts up with’ Jason and is endlessly thirsty for ~Her Elias~. They’re interrupted anyway by the neighbor coming upstairs and demanding what the fuck!! To which Clara says:
“But you don’t understand. He doesn’t even know what’s going on half the time. If he was normal, maybe, fine make your judgements, but he’s not. He’s no protector. He’s vulnerable.”
O_o Clara what the fuck, if that’s what you believe then what the fuck????
Elias is rightfully hurt!! So he switches out with Jason. For some reason, the neighbor trusts Clara of all people to ‘handle’ their own autistic son because… she… Deals.. With Elias. And they consider him a lost cause.
Lo and behold, the son is actually also a genius and was only Pretending to be disabled to hide the project he’s been working on: Digging through the old slave escape tunnels underneath the whole of Salem. The trio make their getaway and leave the son behind. Clara gives him a kiss and is offended that he doesn’t really like it as much as he likes Izzy
Following Izzy’s Greek myth analogy she shared to understand Jason’s POV, they end up going to an artists’ commune and staying there for an amount of time. Elias is avoidant of Clara and he surrounds himself with people who actually like him, along with Izzy. In a fit of jealousy, Clara goes up the mountain to pray each night because she comes to…realize…God…. No, ‘Ungod’, because she doesn’t believe in God, but this is still published by Blink, a Christian publisher, so they had to shoehorn in the obligatory turning to God makes everything right trope, even if the only thing she changes is just.. being away from Elias for a little bit.
During the time at the commune, Elias fixed the plane they were hauling around this whole time. As a reward for leaving him the fuck alone for a while, Clara gets to have a nice friendly moment where they fly the plane together. Izzy decides being at the commune is what’s doing her a lot of good, so she’s going to stay behind as Elias and Clara set off once again.
They go to the last Salem, which is in Maine. At some point along their journey, they figure out that the Lightkeeper’s tower they’re looking for is the substitute belief version of a certain lighthouse. The root of all the trauma happened there. As they grow nearer, both Elias and Jason are growing apprehensive. And Clara is pushing ahead harder than ever because she wants to be done with this all.
They have a spat. They pour soup on eachother and split up. It’s kind of a running theme that Clara often abandons Elias to go have her huffs, and they’re always justified. She figures hes helpless and can’t really leave where she puts him anyway, so she goes off with a strange man to this certain lighthouse
The man’s name is Salt, a lobster fisher of course(It’s Maine after all), who takes her to another lobster fisher named Atticus. It turns out that man knew Elias’ father, the root of all trauma.
Elias and his father would go to this lighthouse to watch the stars when he was young. The lighthouse was surrounded by steep, rigid rock, so it was difficult to get out there safely. Elias adored his father. Once night, when Atticus dropped him off at the lighthouse, the father and a strange woman emerged from the lighthouse, in attempt to hide their shame: the father was cheating on Elias’ mother. Clearly upset, Elias tried to flee from his father, shoving him off the edge, where he fell and cracked his skull, dying. Elias had killed his father, and that’s when he split.
That’s when Clara went oh my god, this whole time.. those sketches!! They were about ELIAS’ TRAUMA and not her own.
Clara’s secret trauma is that she had a baby brother with down syndrome. On the way home from a hospital visit, it was icy and snowy out. Clara was supposed to take her baby brother in, but he got dropped, cracked his head open also, and died. Then police came and arrested the father for this, and all this time Clara kept the truth a secret, keeping her father in prison for the past decade. And from then on, Clara was different too… Ableist 😔
Having discovered his trauma for him, Clara rushed back to find Elias. He’s understandably hurt because he’s facing all these memories and getting abandoned in a strange-but-familiar-place over and over again. But she shuts him up and tells him all about her own trauma, using it to force Elias to reconcile with his.
But Jason.. He already knew. And revealed that the death of his father was on purpose, and he came here to seek revenge and kill the woman who caused all this.(Which is kinda implied to be like a mermaid or something because she was already Never Seen Again) Because Jason… Is a Murderer Alter!
Clara, who cannot accept the dark side of having trauma, flees up a mountain and prays to God overnight, leaving Elias all alone, who was very very upset and dysregulated.
The next day, Clara can’t find Elias. She has her father contact the police to arrest him. As she and Salt search high and low, finally Atticus lets them know..
Elias is dead.
He flew the plane into the rocks at the base of the lighthouse, injuring himself badly, but had just enough life back in him to put up sketches of Elias and his father together.
“He didn’t draw, Salt.” I sniffed and pushed myself up. “My Elias didn’t draw. Only the…Only the Other One, and he wouldn’t have hung these. He hated the Keeper… He hated…his..dad. Unless, the two, in the end, unless the two became one.”
He did.
I stared up at Orion, and whispered. “We did it. Elias, you did it. In the end it was just you.”
HES DEAD, CLARA!!! WHO GIVES A RATS ASS IF HE FUSED IF HES DEAD!!!!
The end :>
I apologize both for spoiling the entire book and also putting you through that, as well as my haphazard way of writing. This is an extremely tiring book for only having 254 pages. So much happens, and yet it’s possibly the most boring book in the world to read.
The writing itself is vague and trying to be witty, so it’s actually extremely difficult to tell just what is going on, because it feels like there’s a lot that’s not clarified. I spared you the details about Elias’s theme park machine and giant..spoon…statue..? because it’s altogether nonsense and doesn’t add anything to the already nothingness story.
Yes, I’m being very harsh. This book is a huge insult to anyone who has any neurodivergency, particularly Autism and DID, which are both mentioned explicitly in the book. The way the main character views the people around her is disgusting already, but the way she treats Elias is.. Very confusing. That’s your love interest? The one you have zero faith in, actively dislike half of and scoffs even at ‘Her Elias’ ideas. She’s mean, and it’s not reciprocated banter. She’s just a straight up bitch.
I thought maybe this nonsense world she crossed over into would make more sense if it turned out they were in Salem all along, maybe even if Clara had been the host and she’s actually coming to recognize her own DID. I kept hoping and wishing and that never came to fruition.
But no, Elias is just.. Like that. Treated both by the one who should love him and the narrative itself as something less than human, who doesn’t have choice or any impact on the world around him. And then he fused, and then he died. Because Clara’s journey of self-acceptance was over. Even the author admits he didn’t know what he was doing in the end. Oh sorry, that it ‘Came To Him’. Sure thing, buddy.
If this is your favorite book ever, I’m very sorry. But I’d also love to hear your point of view, so please do share.
What they got Right in my opinion:
The use of substitute beliefs felt slightly realistic, actually. The truth being smudged into something that looks slightly different. Like Salem being both Elias’ way of understanding the world, as well as his inner world. And the Keeper being a lighthouse keeper, his father. The use of stars and mythology coming from the stargazing days with his dad.
Since the split happened as a result of his father’s sexual affairs, it makes sense that Elias recoils from intimate touch. It seems very Trauma to me
What they got Wrong In my opinion:
Where do I even begin? It’s like Mr. Friesen picked up a list on how Not to write DID and followed it as his biblical guide, making sure that he hit every Wrong note.
The Autistic Savant trope is the trope of having the autistic person be both a genius in either a variety of skills or a specific skill, but also being unable to connect on even basic levels with people around them. (think of the movie Rain Man(1988), like being completely unable to understand danger or the world around them as not fitting in their rigid world view. Obviously autistic people with higher support needs do exist(I would love to see more of their stories told in a respectful manner), and a person can be very knowledgeable about their special interests, this trope specifically is a commonly fetishized view of autism seen in media. Especially where the only ‘use’ an autistic person in this role would have is to benefit the (neurotypical) main character and push them towards growth. This is blatant with Elias/Jason’s case.
I can’t find the exact age, but I believe Elias was on the tail end of the age of developing DID. I’m not going to say that he doesn’t have ‘enough trauma’, but DID has been directly correlated with unstable attachments with caregivers in early childhood. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for him to develop DID when he has this fairly secure attachment already with his parents, and even with autism, he would’ve been integrated at this point.
The complete blackout/timeloss with every switch trope. When Jason is there, Elias just is Not. There’s no attempt at recollection, even
DID-blocking medication, lmao
Salem being his inner world as well as.. everyone else’s? This was really vaguely explained in the book and I don’t fully understand how other people ‘have lives’ in his inner world unless he’s just sitting and telling them endlessly about his inner world.
The fact that everyone around him has full knowledge of his disorder when he just does not, it feels very.. Unsafe to me. Treating him like he’s old fashioned ‘insane’ is really… wrong. Even when this abuse of power is questioned, it just gets shut down and smoothed over anyway.
The DID killer trope :I I don’t think I have to explain why this is wrong
Elias is evidently going to a doctor regularly and it has officially been named Dissociative Identity Disorder by said doctor.. Why isn’t there any trauma therapy?
Not DID related, but my British fiancé wants everyone to know that the ‘fine English breakfast’ of sausage, bacon and rolls is just pathetic and this horrible British girl is written extremely clearly my an American.
If even people who call the disorder “Dissociative Personality Disease” feel like this is badly written, THEN ITS BADLY WRITTEN
There is probably more but I am exhausted and want to chuck this library book in the trash to spare anyone else from reading this. This review is 6 PAGES LONG
Would I recommend this to someone with DID to read?: NO!!!!!!!!!!!
