Life with Parts: A Memoir by Peter Bein is a portrayal of the author’s lived experience with Dissociative Identity Disorder.  The memoir, told through an assortment of 50 short stories, highlights Bein’s interaction with internal parts and the outside world after his diagnosis in 2016.

The author muses, sharing some darker moments he thought he’d keep private, and the reader can read between the lines to learn the identity of a deceased abuser.  The author writes fondly about the sister he never met and his inner teenaged girls.  He hopes the reader will find meaning in a story.

Life with Parts:  A Memoir is available through the author’s website (listed below).  You can also provide him with your mailing address, and he will send you a copy.

A:   Sense of humor, serious, stick-to-it-iveness

A:   We remember Poison Zumac, Dumbo the Elephant, Big Head and Little Pear.

A:  We don’t have that kind of inspiration as an early memory, but part of our current writing process includes a bit of reading, kind of like priming the pump. Reading Tessa Hadley or Aysegul Savas or Gabriel Marquez (100 Years of Solitude) for 10 minutes causes us to run for a pen and paper.

A:  I was a computer programmer and learning a structured style of writing COBOL, which helped/helps me organize a story.

As a child, we watched the Sherman and Peabody cartoon series on TV. Mr. Peabody had a way of ending an episode with a quip/witticism which somehow has influenced the way I end a story today. Go figure.

A:  We write every day and we can feel lost if we don’t write.

A:  Many years ago, we found a suitcase hidden in our childhood home. Our father-person was a Holocaust survivor, and this was his suitcase. When we opened the suitcase, we knew we had a story but didn’t know how to tell it; we were teaching math at the time. So, we enrolled in a writing program at a local college, and our capstone project was the beginning of Maxwell’s Suitcase. We just kept writing.

A:  That’s difficult to say. Although I haven’t always been conscious of our system, I’ve always had parts, so I don’t know what writing would be like without them.

A:  We have read about the lived experiences of others with DID and being able to relate validates our experiences and lessens the feeling we have that we are crazy or making things up.

A:  Thinking about the audience is a challenge. Who is going to believe this stuff?

A:  We wanted to begin and end on the lighter side. Then there is kind of a chronology filter, and some neighboring stories are related.

A:  Our parts decided. It was a comfort thing.

A:  Lynette’s email address is on the back cover. It is interesting to think about stories coming from a fragmented system and hidden meanings. That makes us laugh. Weren’t they all hidden?

A:  We like the proverb following the Author’s Note.  “One can survive anything, as long as it is part of a story.” We think that sums up how the process of writing about difficult life events can diminish their intrusiveness.

We also like, “We are going to tell you a story we don’t want you to know.” That is a realistic representation of some inner conflict we had about sharing our stories. 

A:  Creating a book has many moving parts and putting them all together between a front and back cover is something any author can be proud of. We liked the negotiation between an inside creative part who wanted the cover art just so and our inner project manager part who just wanted the project done. He threw down his cards when he told us, “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”

We are also proud of being able to negotiate with parts so that all felt comfortable sharing our stories, albeit with a limited audience of our choosing.

A:  Healing can take the form of being comfortable in situations that had previously been stressful.

A:  BIG BIG BIG “One can survive anything as long as it’s part of a story.”

A:  We take a lot of breaks. Walks in the park. Meetings. Sometimes we can only go for ten or twenty minutes. We remind ourselves that there isn’t a time limit and we don’t have a contract to produce material. We can have two or three stories open at a time so if one is too difficult, we can work on another. Sometimes we cry. Sometimes we have the thrill of discovering a gold nugget puzzle piece.

A:  We were surprised at how important the cover art became, and we liked how we negotiated to get to the final product. We didn’t mind crying or cursing or shaking our head in disbelief while writing. Of course, we liked smiling and laughing with insiders.

A:  Are we making this up? Are we writing fiction or non-fiction?

A:  Some of the impacts are impervious to measurement. Some readers are silent. Of course, we love compliments and identification. The identification is validating

A:  We hope that a story is meaningful to a reader.

A:  Everyone’s journey is different and everyone is in a different place on the road. We couldn’t begin to guess.

A:  We see others in the community healing, and we see ourselves healing. That gives us hope.

A:  Our motivation is knowing that writing our stories helps us figure out what happened to us.

A:  Read memoirs and writing by those who describe their lived experiences. And write every day. Think of it as if you have a writing muscle that needs to be kept in shape.

A:  Natalie Goldberg’s books, Writing Down the Bones and Old Friend from Far Away.

A:  We love short stories and we love the writer Aysegul Savas. Her new book, Long Distance, is the intersection of the two. We are also reading A Safe Passage to Healing by Chrystine Oksana.

A:  ME

And we would like Corrine to be in the film as well. 😊

A:   We are writing another memoir in 50 short stories, a little further down our recovery path with a bit more knowledge of our childhood. This book might be a little messier because of the RAMCOA connection.

A:  Our parts want you know that they did not want to sell the book because they said, “We’ve already been sold.”