The Third Person - Emma Grove

[goodreads]

Title: Third Person
Author: Emma Grove
Genre: Memoir, graphic book
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 920
Date read: August, 2023

In the winter of 2004, a shy woman named Emma sits in Toby’s office. She wants to share this wonderful new book she’s reading, but Toby, her therapist, is concerned with other things. Emma is transgender, and has sought out Toby for approval for hormone replacement therapy. Emma has shown up at the therapy sessions as an outgoing, confident young woman named Katina, and a depressed, submissive workaholic named Ed. She has little or no memory of her actions when presenting as these other two people. And then Toby asks about her childhood . . .

As the story unfolds, we discover clues to Emma’s troubled past and how and why these other two people may have come into existence. As Toby juggles treating three separate people, each with their own unique personalities and memories, he begins to wonder if Emma is merely acting out to get attention, or if she actually has Dissociative Identity Disorder. Is she just a troubled woman in need of help? And is “the third person” in her brain protecting her, or derailing her chances of ever finding peace?


Don't be intimidated by the length - due to its form, it's very quickly read and I finished it in just a few hours.

I'm not entirely sure what I thought of it. Parts of it were very jumbled and confusing to read, but that was explained in the end, when Emma explained the process she went through to write the book, so I guess it couldn't really have been any different. Also, I sometimes got confused which 'person' was presenting... but again, I think that was more or less deliberate and we weren't supposed to.

Mostly I got insanely frustrated by Toby. Possibly an extremely incompetent therapist - DEFINITELY a bad fit for them, and he should have pushed harder on getting them to see a different therapist. I know he tried - but still. I know very, very little about D.I.D. - only what I've learned through following D.I.D. creators online, which I know is terribly flawed - and even I could see some of the mistakes he made.

But all that aside, it was a very interesting book, and I'm glad I've read it.