The Third Person

 
The Third Person

by Emma Grove

Drawn & Quarterly
2022

 

 

The Third Person is a graphic memoir, which tells the story of a trans woman in her early 30s who goes to a therapist to get prescribed hormones, and instead spends most of a year being treated for Dissociative Identity Disorder and multiple personalities.

To be clear, by Grove's own account, she did have DID, so this was not like, a confused therapist mistaking transition for multiple personalities. But this also wasn't the book I expected to read. It's not a book about Grove being trans, it's a book about her having DID. That she is trans and should live as a woman are essentially taken as given by both Grove and her therapist. Being trans isn't quite incidental to her story - it's why she thought therapy, and homophobic bullying as a child is a key part of why she began dissociating - but it's certainly not central either.

 
Although The Third Person is a little over 900 pages, it reads quickly. Grove's art is cartoony, but very effective at depicting facial expressions and body language, so we see when her therapist is skeptical, confused, exasperated, etc, and you can virtually always tell which personality is dominant in each moment.

 
The first 100 pages show a scene of tween Grove trying to hide her crossdressing from her family, and then a long scene of teen Grove having blackouts and a second personality during a stressful social event. There's also, in montage form, a few pages showing her life working during the day as a guy and going out at night as a woman.

 
The final 200 show Grove after dropping her therapist. She buys a DID workbook and uses it to work through her traumatic memories. She gets a new therapist who helps her finish the process of reintegration. And she finally gets to live full-time as a woman.

 
In between are 600 pages of dialogue between Grove and her therapist. This is not how I wish she'd structured her story. I find this pacing really odd, but I guess this interaction is what she wants her book to be about, with the rest of her life collapsed into prologue and epilogue before and after. The therapist first suspects she has DID, then spends a long long time suspecting that she's faking having multiple personalities to get attention, then trying to treat her, but by that point, the two have accumulated too much history of negative interactions for the therapist's change of heart to matter. So finally she leaves.
 

One thing worth noting if you decide to read it. At times, Grove seems unbelievably obtuse in her inability to understand the therapist's suspicions and accusations. (It certainly doesn't help that always answers her questions with questions, like 'Why do YOU think I'm saying I think you're lying to me?') But a thing Grove the author never explicitly points out, although the therapist says something about it once, ironically to justify his suspicions, is that one effect of her mental illness is that it prevents her from understanding someone pointing out her illness. If she dissociates to protect herself from unpleasant knowledge, then of course she is 'absent' at key moments to protect herself from being made to understand how dissociating is harming her. 

 
Without understanding that though, you'll find yourself asking 'how can she possibly think he's accusing her of pretending to be trans to get attention when he's OBVIOUSLY accusing her of pretending to have multiple personalities to get attention?'