How does a child survive years of unimaginable abuse?
She splits.
And splits again. And again. And again.
And she does survive. But not without consequences.
As a young adult, years after her physical abuse has ended, Maggie Walters struggles with an
unpredictable temper and socially difficult behaviour. After several false starts she finds a therapist
who she trusts, just enough, to start talking about the childhood locked away behind the anger and
isolation she has learnt to live with.
Eventually she is diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, MPD (now known as Dissociative
Identity Disorder or DID).
Gradually, she understands. It was not Maggie who survived her childhood. The instinct to survive
created an alternative identity called Annie, who with a myriad of other ‘alters’, lived through the
abuse inflicted on her.
Decades later, with a husband and three much-loved children, Maggie strives to live a normal life
despite a past which has left her internal world with a hidden, dark secret. Every day, unseen by
those around her, trigger incidents fill her head with voices, the chaotic remnants of her other selves
who lived the childhood she couldn’t. This is the ‘normal’ which Maggie has learned to live with.
In SPLIT Maggie tells the story of managing this ‘normal’, of understanding and accepting her past,
and standing strong in the life she has built from the ashes of her broken childhood.
It is a story not only of survival, but of self-acceptance, of the triumph to simply live. You will not
read another book like it.
