I think what normal girls do is they read/watch Sybil when they’re like 13 years old, get disturbed and enthralled, and then they move on—to horses or boys or pot or whatever. However, this “OMG BUT I TRANSCEND NORMAL” girl latched onto what salon.com calls high Midwestern gothic trash—after I first saw the movie in my high school psychology class, my fixation turned into a long-lasting love. I got a Sybil-inspired tattoo on my arm after college (it’s part of an abstract painting by Shirley Mason, the real-life Sybil), and I can’t count the number of obscure in-jokes I’ve shared with friends who I insist watch the movie with me (“Sybil has dissociated into a baby… get her some cheesecake”). Last summer I took a trip to NYC, looked up the address of Shirley’s old apartment in the library’s archived phone-books, and walked by it. Here is a photo of my creepy stalker feet on her former front steps!
I don’t know how to explain how much the story has meant to me, in part because its meaning to me has changed over time, in part because I have a moderately obsessive personality and it’s difficult not to sound like one of those silly teenage girls. (Maybe a part of me will always just remain a silly teenage girl?) I was talking about it with my roommate this afternoon, trying to figure out a way to articulate why it has been so compelling, why it’s not so much the stories of horrific abuse that drew me in, why it’s not even about Sybil having multiple personalities. I was always dubious about the extent of both, understanding they were likely exaggerated for the sake of drama (like most “based on a true story” tales are). But the appeal of Sybil, for me, was something to do with the expressed emotional intensity of a girl that was not about her being a villain or a passive victim. She finds her voice, she gets help, she heals. Her craziness is glamorized in the story, for sure, but especially in Sally Field’s portrayal I think it’s not just superficial glamour, there’s something legitimately beautiful about her vulnerability. Also, there was something that surprised me—and moved me—in the way Dr. Wilbur (her [female] psychiatrist) interacted with Sybil, though when I was a sophomore in high school I didn’t really understand what that was (which I’ll get to in a moment!).
Last week I heard about Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case by Debbie Nathan—a new book that argues Sybil, the original book written by Flora Schreiber, was largely a hoax; it examines notes from Dr. Wilbur, notes from Schreiber, and interviews with people who had known Shirley (Sybil), Dr. Wilbur, and Schreiber. I thought I’d read Nathan’s book and formulate a convincing response for why the Sybil story could still stay safely protected and pure in my heart. From the initial reviews I read, I believed the book would sensationalize and that its information would be slanted with Nathan’s own bias, which is a history in journalism of critiquing false memories of child abuse.
And Sybil Exposed was both of those things, somewhat. (I was most suspicious of the excessive ambition of some of the closing chapters, which made dramatic and sweeping implications about Multiple Personality Disorder and false memories in general.) But the book also seemed thoroughly researched and written with a gentle kind of carefulness I did not expect. I was actually pretty heart-broken by its convincing case, because it reveals some really awful, disturbing distortions in the Sybil story. Examples: Dr. Wilbur kept Shirley on an intense combination of psychotropic drugs for many years which seriously messed up/confused Shirley, which might explain why, in part, she felt so tortured, and perhaps made her suggestible to Dr. Wilbur’s preconceived hypothesis of MPD and abuse; Dr. Wilbur was super boundary-crossing and unethical, promised to pay for Shirley’s grad school if Shirley agreed to let her write a book about her, made down-payments on apartments for Shirley, etc, so Shirley became essentially financially dependent on her; the diary of Shirley’s that convinced Schreiber of the validity of Shirley’s multiple personalities was likely faked, so says forensic evidence. Mostly I was really bothered by the level of fucked-up-ness in the co-dependent relationship between Shirley and Dr. Wilbur—Shirley was lonely, neurotic, and desperately wanted a maternal figure’s approval/attention; Dr. Wilbur was arrogant, hoped to make a name for herself, liked to feel powerful and needed. Their desires fed into each other. It’s like together they created this huge inescapable mess in one another and then drowned in it.
And while I can’t dispute the claims of Sybil Exposed, I might question the extremity of them, especially the enormous damaging cultural responsibility Nathan argues Sybil holds. And I still wouldn’t call Sybil a complete hoax—this might be naive but I think that surely there must have been moments of authenticity somewhere, at some point, even in the muck. I do think there were a lot of smaller-scale deceptions, especially cases of people lying to themselves. Dr. Wilbur was confused, but she didn’t think she was, and instead believed she knew everything. She was unable to understand the complexity of what was happening to her and Shirley. But, at the same time, I was also frustrated at Sybil Exposed for similarly over-simplifying whatever it was that went on, particularly 1) Nathan’s entirely too-neat cultural/feminist thesis explaining and then effectively dismissing MPD, and 2) when Nathan guessed at people’s motivations (i.e Dr. Wilbur always wanted to have black hair, so obviously Dr. Wilbur must have looooved Shirley right away the first moment she met her because Shirley had black hair!). OH ALSO. Cheap shot about Shirley’s dolls, Ms. Nathan. Yes, adult women who have dolls are creepy. WE GET IT.
As a lighter/more entertaining aside, one thing that amused me as I read Sybil Exposed was that I was not the only person in the world who picked up on the lesbian subtext of their story. I remember when I first saw the movie and hearing Sybil confess to Dr. Wilbur, with large amounts of angst and shame, that she loved her, and Dr. Wilbur not being horrified by her affection, but accepting it—I remember being shocked and really happy, though like I said I didn’t understand why at the time. Anyway, it seems that Schreiber herself noticed something, too!—at some point she became convinced Dr. Wilbur and Sybil were lovers. I LOVE the exclamation of one her irritated friends, who said, upon hearing about the Sybil story, “What the hell? You’re dealing with a psychiatrist who is obviously having a homosexual relationship with this girl!” Schreiber also didn’t like the screenplay adaptation for the movie because she thought it had lesbian overtones. Haha. I knew it. Finally, there was apparently some convoluted controversy involving a lawsuit against the Sybil book because in the book there had been a phrase about a particular store selling “gay pajamas.” Schreiber had meant “gay” in the colorful fun way, but the store owners freaked out, thinking people would assume the store sold “bedroom apparel to some ‘sick’ i.e. lesbian’ girl.” I don’t even know. GAY PAJAMAS. Amazing.
Back to the gloom. I finished Sybil Exposed last night at 3 AM feeling really sad and disappointed. Sybil had been such a hopeful and beautiful story to me, with a happy ending about a troubled/lonely/confused girl who learned, through love and self-awareness, how to make herself whole. And then I was just thinking: so there might not have been a happy ending after all; much of it may have been manufactured; people are hopelessly complicated and messed up, we entangle one another so miserably, why do we even try to get close to each other, why do we even try to help one another? I wish there had been at least a story or two from “the other side” that gave even a tiny glimpse of something good that happened, allowing for more gray area. I know Sybil Exposed is a cautionary story, so it must focus on the negative. It sounds like stuff got so ugly for Shirley. But somewhere there must have been some kind of promise of hope. This afternoon I looked up some information about a friend of Shirley’s, from her later years, just to try to glean any kind of positive or more reassuring take-away. I do not know anything about this woman—I saw her speaking on the Sybil DVD, that’s all—but she is one of the only other present-day voices about Sybil I could find. She has kind, generous words to say about her friendship with Shirley, and she includes a prayer; it concludes: may we… realize we are not alone. I don’t know what there is to say about that, in general or in relation to the Sybil story, but somehow those words just feel like the best way to end this (rather long-winded) post.