In my novel, In Flight, the main character, Robert Besch, suffers from a severe psychological disturbance called dissociative fugue—“a form of amnesia characterized by temporary loss of your identity and unplanned travel or wandering without apparent purpose.” It is typically triggered by extreme stress or emotional trauma.
Robert survives a harrowing plane crash and risks his life to save fellow passengers, but then he disappears from the scene, only to be found several days later in a hotel room with the woman who was sitting next to him on the plane. He remembers nothing. He has no way to explain what happened.
Dissociative fugue can make for great storytelling. Such a severe and rare disorder reminds us of the complexity and mystery of the human brain.
When writing In Flight, I included a half dozen or so real-world examples of dissociative fugue in the narrative to underpin Robert’s story arc, including this one on page 181:
Then there was the nineteenth-century case of Ansel Bourne, a preacher who moved from Rhode Island to Pennsylvania, assumed a different name, and became a confectioner. He “woke up” two months later having no memory of what happened. His name was picked up by the author Robert Ludlum for his Bourne series of novels, which Robert had read and liked.
I get into doing the research required to create compelling characters and design an authentic fictional world. I interviewed psychiatrists, read published papers, and did my share of internet searches.
Recently I came across another novelist who also did research in this area. I just finished reading The Strange Case of Jane O., the most recent novel by Karen Thompson Walker, whose first novel, The Age of Miracles, I’d read some years ago. I was interested in her new work when I read in its description that “Jane is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what happened to her.”
Page 95 of The Strange Case of Jane O:
In 1887, a Rhode Island preacher named Ansel Bourne went missing from his home.
Two months passed without any word.
And then one morning, two hundred miles away, in a small town in Pennsylvania, the owner of boardinghouse heard a knock on his door. When he opened it, he found one of his tenants standing there . . . “Where am I?” he asked his landlord, like someone surfacing from a long dream.
Seems as if Klein and Walker did some of the same research, although our novels are nothing alike, and there’s no overlap of the other documented cases of dissociative fugue we each mention. Yet our two stories reinforce the concept there exists only a limited number of plots—some “experts” say as little as seven major storylines, others say up to thirty-six dramatic situations.
Spoiler alert: Jane O. didn’t suffer from a dissociative fugue. Nor was she faking, which can sometimes happen. The novel offers two narrative threads: Jane’s case as seen her psychiatrist’s point of view and Jane’s own journal she is writing to her son. What Walker is known for is adding a supernatural element to her story arcs, and this novel follows suit, and it offers a convenient if not convincing explanation for Jane’s behavior.
The Strange Case of Jane O. is a quick read, fascinating in parts and problematic in others. Give it a try if you like these kind of novels that explore our complicated psyches. Because we all have one—a complicated psyche. And we all dissociate, in mild ways.
To dissociate means to detach or disconnect from the current moment and your place in reality. Like that pleasant daydreaming you did yesterday when your mind took you to an imagined time and place and you stayed there for a bit. Or the highway hypnosis you experienced, when you drove to a destination and upon arriving you don’t remember any of the drive, not one road, not one turn, not one light. Or that time you got completely lost in another world while reading one of my novels, or another writer’s novels I suppose.
So it’s okay, even expected, to dissociate, to an extent. But if it gets too far, then you have a serious mental disorder, and in addition to all the trauma you must face you also might end up serving as the character inspiration in someone’s novel.
