The Girls He Adored
Media Review : Books"

Reviewed by Ruth 08.25.2005

The Girls He Adored
by Jonathan Nasaw
Pap Ed: ISBN 0671787454
Pub: Pocket Star, 6.99
Review by Ruth.

While we're discussing portrayals of multiplicity, fictional or otherwise, how bad is The Girls he Adored by Jonathon Nasaw? I mean, I was *expecting* it to be a bad portrayal of multiples(it is a 'slasher' book) but the reviewers on amazon.com made this author out to be the next Thomas Harris. His storyline was predictable and boring, the violence gratuitous and none of his characters believable or likeable.

His ideas about multiplicity itself were a mixture of the run of the mill assumptions and just plain bizarre. for example, the 'therapist' in the story found out that the Ulysses system had forms of communication and co- running, and that different system members tested differently psychometrically, and she decided that Ulysses was some new form of multiple that wasn't one person fractured, but was *so* broken that different people that emerged in the one body, something never seen before. Um, hello? How much did Nasaw actually research?

Many individuals of the same systems have scored differently on standard tests, ranging from psychological to physical. Even in the era of DID, this is something doctors who acknowledge the existence of multiplicity grudgingly admit - that things like allergies, IQ, psychological conditions and brainwave patterns *can* vary depending on who is fronting in some systems. Sybil and Billy Milligan both had conditions that affected some individuals and not others.

He pulled the old cats out of the bag, mentioning sybil and three faces of eve and that 'all multiples' have severe sexual and physical abuse, yadda yadda yadda, the list goes on. (Never mind that Chris Costner Sizemore in 'Eve' refuted what 'Three Faces' suggested, by denying that she was a victim of incest, and stating that it was her multiplicity that *caused* many instances of physical dicipline she received from her family, rather than the other way around.)

But really what turned me off was that the story was just a bad read. Even if it was just a singlet bad guy, it wouldn't make it any better. The plot was a hodge podge of concepts stolen from Psycho and Silence of the Lambs (mommy concept from Psycho, the whole therapist obsession very Hannibal lecter/Clarisse). Some aspects of the Ulysses system *felt* a bit like they'd been adapted from some aspects of Milligan's system. Milligan being one of the most well known and well documented legit multiples to be convicted of a violent crime, that's not really surprising.

If anyone else has read this book, you have my sympathies. It's a few hours of my life I can never get back. I stuck with it past about page fifty only so I could bitch about it later.

Ruth

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