Sybil Exposed

Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case, by Debbie Nathan, is a marvelous, marvelous read. Completely impossible to put down.

It is a biography of the three central women behind the Sybil book -- the real life Sybil, Shirley A Mason, her shrink, Connie Wilbur, and the author Flora Schriber. It describes the histories and issues of these frustrated women and the ways in which they manipulated and exploited each other. In particular it focuses on the ways in which Wilbur manipulated Shirley into acting out, and the ways in which the diagnosis of MPD was constructed out of thwarted needs and misguided attempts at finding satisfaction. The diagnoses, is a hoax; but it tapped into anxieties and concerns of two generations of American women, the pre-feminist and early feminist women who were negotiating new female identities...

I loved reading this book. I gobbled it up on the plane to Syracuse and back and was disappointed when it ended...