Twenty-Four Shadows

A powerful novel about disassociative identity disorder. 

Issac is a happily married man with a beautiful son and a fun job as a mascot for a baseball team. 

Yet he's frequently plagued with deep feelings of being a horrible person and undeserving of his wife and family. That he's ruining them. 

There's always been odd lost moments in his life but now he's starting to lose bigger chunks of time. More things happen that can't be explained. Worst of all, he can't cover it up like he used to because he's being witnessed doing things that are very uncharacteristic of him. 

We learn more about the disorder, also known as DID, and how it's more representative of the illness than the old name: multiple personality disorder. 

We get to experience from the inside, the terror and confusion and fear of the main person. Especially in the days of discovering and diagnosing the problem. And beginning the treatment for it. 

I felt a little bit of it to be repetitive. Then I realized that it was the constant fear, negative reinforcement and self-hate that Isaac was inflicting on himself. Makes sense. 

A very moving book. Recommended to everyone. 

A big thank you to the publisher for providing me an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

An eye-opening look into the world of mental illness, specifically dissociative identity disorder or DID. As Isaac realizes he is losing touch with huge blocks of time in his life, he is terrified, and feeling he is a bad person. Diagnosis is difficult and the toll on his family huge. For me, reading about Isaac's self-hate and negative reinforcement was most uncomfortable and led me to explore the realities of DID and its effects. Well-written!

Though fictional this reads more like non-fiction. So many stories about mental illness go out of hand, tend to make a Gothic madwoman or madman out of the afflicted. This is not that sort of fiction.

This novel is harsh because you live through the unraveling of Isaac Bittman’s mind and life. In a sense, it’s a sort of horror story – because what is more horrifying than not having control of your own mind or personality? Peterson brings us a person struggling with their mental illness rather than a caricature of them. Truly climbing into such a life isn’t as simple as a creative imagination, dissociative identity disorder (or any mental illness really) isn’t something the rest of us fully understand. The reader experiences the ups and downs through Isaac and it makes for heavy-hearted reading. The family aspect just brought to mind how much harder it must be to heal when so many are affected. Mental illness has always been that shameful secret people hid or denied, anyone can look through history and see the inhumane ways such people were dealt with in the past. We like to think we’ve come far (and from a rotten starting point we have) but there is still much more exploration to be had, and understanding.
Treatment is a strange beast too, because there is no quick fix. But the difference between having loved ones and having no one is enormous in getting better. I think the hardest moments were reading about his behavior coming to light- when he couldn’t hide what was happening. This is terribly sad and will make some people uncomfortable but maybe it’s time we get over that feeling and open to the possibility of understanding. Peterson does seem to be trying to bring attention to mental health issues, and it’s a good thing.