Read Me: The Third Person Tells a Story of Transition and Dissociative Identity Disorder

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Emma Grove’s debut book, a graphic memoir titled The Third Person, is a profoundly moving and intimate portrayal of a life in pieces made whole.

The 49-year-old trans author, who started drawing before she could write, was inspired early in her life by Disney cartoons and trained to become a traditional animator, only to watch 3D animation take over the industry. About four years ago, emboldened by authors like Alison Bechdel and Jennifer Finney Boylan, Grove began working on a memoir that was supposed to be about her transition. Instead, she found herself circling back, again and again, to a period of a few months that she couldn’t remember — until she began to literally sketch it out. 

The Third Person covers far more than just that period of time, but its focus is on the six months during which Grove was seeing a therapist, a trans man called “Toby” in the book, in the hopes of getting approval for hormone therapy. Much of the book takes place in a single room, therapist and patient sitting across from one another, trying to make the relationship work despite misunderstandings, and no shortage of bad behavior on Toby’s part. With thick, spare lines, Grove beautifully captures expressions, body language, and her own bafflement as she tries to understand why Toby won’t approve her for the hormones she desperately needs to live as herself.

What Toby was seeing, however, wasn’t always what Grove was experiencing. Sometimes Grove showed up to therapy not as Emma, but as Katina, a bubbly, confident femme with a don’t-fuck-with-me attitude. Other times, she showed up as Ed, what she calls her “guy mode” in the book, who was the person Emma had to be for much of her adult life as one workplace after another required her to present as a man in order to keep or find a job.

It’s no spoiler — the book’s description reveals this — to say that Grove began to understand that she had dissociative identity disorder, or DID, a complex condition in which a person dissociates so completely that their mind creates, and often walls off, one or more personalities (called alters) in order to function and be present during those dissociative episodes. Despite flourishing online communities raising awareness of the disorder, there’s still a lot of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and doubt surrounding the condition.  

Ahead of her book’s publication, Grove spoke with Them at length about writing from memory, DID, shame, and therapy.

The Third Person is such a powerful but also vulnerable book. Would you tell me about the process of writing about that six-month period of therapy sessions? 

I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to remember it. I didn’t want to think about it. There was a vague memory of drama and bad things happening, so I decided to sit down and remember what this was, and I just started writing. 

I picked this one session where I brought in a book and, in my mind, a few minutes later, the book vanished. I decided to start with that, to try to figure out what happened to that book. Why did it vanish and what happened then? The Third Person took off from there. I was remembering it as I was writing it. I didn’t do the sessions chronologically. I would start with session number 12, and then I would do session number six and then I’d do session number eight. Then I went back and tried to remember session number nine. 

They all interlocked, and I started to understand what happened. The book was very healing because, as I was writing, I was literally figuring it out and remembering it as I wrote it. What you see in the inked pages is basically just a cleaned up version of those first rough sketches that I did. When you have DID, sections of your brain get walled off. When I started writing, everything just came out in a flood. I started remembering every single thing that happened. Not only could I remember the dialogue, I could remember the gestures and what I was wearing. 

When I was writing it, there were so many things I was ashamed of, like deeply ashamed. So then I’m like, “What if I got everything I’m deeply ashamed of out on the page and just threw it out there?”

When I started doing that, I noticed — well, this isn’t that bad. It isn’t as bad as I thought it was. What I was trying to do, honestly, was alleviate the shame of being transgendered, of having dissociative identity disorder. I was always afraid of telling people that, because, well, they’ll think I’m crazy, that I’m unstable, and it might invalidate me as a transgendered person; like, you’re not really a woman, you’re just crazy.

So my one motto when I was writing this book was, “If you’re ashamed of it, put it in the book.” And I saw that if I just barrel through this and put everything I’m ashamed of on the page, then maybe I’ll see that I’m not that bad. And maybe other people will see they’re not that bad either. 

The Third Person is about your own transition and coping with DID, but it’s also about a therapist’s failure. Why did you focus the book primarily on the therapy sessions?

That was actually healing, too. I know I wasn’t completely blameless in the therapy sessions, but at the same time, I was seeing a lot of biographies and autobiographies about these therapists that really helped people [with DID]. But I didn’t have that good of an experience, so I wanted to write about that. 

I didn’t want to paint [the therapist] as a one-dimensional character. I wanted to show that he could be sweet, caring, and nurturing, but at the same time, there were things [he did] that I learned later were therapeutic no-nos. This was the first real therapist I’d seen full-time and I just didn’t know that these things were unacceptable and inappropriate. I kept thinking that I was going to him for approval [for hormone therapy], and I kept thinking, if I can just get mentally healthier and figure out what he’s talking about… 

For three months or more, he didn’t tell me why he wouldn’t approve me. He wouldn’t tell me what was going on. 

One motivation in doing the book was I had read other biographies about dissociative identity disorder and multiple personality, and most of them were written from the therapist’s point of view. I’d never seen a book that showed visually what dissociation felt like. What does it feel like to dissociate? What does it feel like to have multiple personalities? The disorientation, the blackouts — how does that feel? And can I translate that feeling onto the page visually in a way that the reader will understand and feel it too? I thought that if I could do that, then I’d have done something that I hadn’t seen yet. 

How do you feel in hindsight about “Toby,” the therapist in the book? 

I’ve gone through mixed emotions. As I was writing it, my initial reaction was remembering the good things. Then there was one thing he said to me that I remembered when I was on lunch break from work. [Toby] was talking about my grandfather, and he was like, “Now I see why [your grandfather] beat you.” Honestly, I cried for three days when I recalled that memory. I wish that hadn’t happened, that nobody had ever said that to me. It was the most hateful thing anyone has ever said to me ever, and as a transgender person, I’ve had people say some pretty mean things to me.

He did apologize for these things and try to make amends. I don’t wish any harm on anyone and I didn’t write this book to attack anyone. The main thing this book taught me is how messed up everyone is. We all think we’ve got it all figured out, but we’re all just messed up in our own way. 

I don't think Toby was a bad person. I don’t think I'm a bad person. I think we make mistakes. 

The second therapist, toward the end of the book, says that “someone should write a book about how some transsexuals use DID to survive being trans.” Which is part of the work this book is doing, of course. How do you think DID helped you survive being trans? 

The main thing it helped me deal with was the abuse — but it [also] really helped me deal with being transgendered. When you grow up and you’re like, I’m a girl, but nobody will let you be one or accept you as one; mentally, you need that outlet. I think, honestly, that the way I used dissociative identity disorder to survive mentally was actually pretty healthy. 

There’s a lot of therapists nowadays who, rather than looking at people with DID as scary sick people, look at [the disorder] as a form of creative coping. When you were a kid and something traumatic happened to you, you couldn’t process it mentally, you couldn’t handle it, and if you didn’t have an alter to escape into, or an alter to protect you, you literally would’ve gone insane. 

I had two parts and they were vital for me surviving. Katina was my outlet: she was the ultra girly, ultra out there, ultra brave girl that I could not be in real life, that I was restricted from being. And then my other alter, Ed, was who I had to be to survive, to hold down a job, to not be socially ostracized. 

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You know, I got beaten up a lot when I was younger. The beating from my grandfather started when I was four, almost five, and it didn't stop until I was 13. But I got regularly beaten at school, by the older kids. That didn’t stop until I was a senior in high school and they were gone. I show a very, very, very small fraction of it in the book. 

I had nowhere to escape to. I got it at home, I got it at school. When you’re transgendered, when you’re a little kid and you’re very androgynous, it’s not a big deal. But when you start reaching puberty and the difference between the boys and the girls really becomes pronounced, it’s clear you’re not fitting in. I was being socially ostracized, picked on, beaten up. I needed to find some way of functioning. 

That’s where Ed came in. Without forming that other part, I wouldn’t have survived.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

The Third Person is available now from Drawn & Quarterly.

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