“The Third Person”

Winsome but harrowing. Fractured but elegant. Unforgettably distinct, yet somehow identifiable to the core. You grasp for words to describe “The Third Person” by Emma Grove (Drawn & Quarterly, 2022), a reading experience that will absorb you into its 900 pages in one sitting and linger with you for weeks and months. But what makes this complex story involving dissociative identity disorder, misaligned treatment, surviving trauma, and transgender experience so potent is just how simple and startlingly open a work of art it is.

Written and Illustrated by Emma Grove

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?

“The Third Person” does beautiful justice to those it represents by telling, with compelling and hard-earned simplicity, a kind of story too often disserviced by outsiders who muddle it. Recalling more than a dozen years back, Emma Grove sought a sign-off from a therapist (called “Toby”) for gender transition treatments. But Grove is beset by Toby’s reluctance when Toby discovers— and disbelieves!— the dissociative identities of Emma, Ed, and Katina who show up unpredictably into his office in Emma’s body. Those dynamics between Toby and Ed or Katina or Emma, their struggles and failures of acknowledgement, their breakthroughs of understanding and acceptance, become the fascinating account of Grove’s memoir.

Through Emma Grove’s artistic and autobiographical choices– a no-frills but solidly consistent and vivacious art style, an unflinching portrayal of flawed people and parts– the book makes relatable what far too many tellings of these types of stories have made groteseque. In doing so, Grove can shine a light on other monstrosities in how we treat each other and ourselves, while paying tribute to the resilience and indeed love in the selves that others may pathologize. Ultimately, Grove’s story is less a condemnation of others’ intolerance or ignorance— though there’s plenty to go around— and more a vindication of the lengths we’ll go to become whole and healed.

The book opens where the actual jigsaw puzzle of Grove’s experience began, according to her afterword: one day in an earlier stage of her life, she brings a library book into her therapist’s office, the book suddenly disappears, and she can only imagine that for some inexplicable reason, her therapist has snatched it away.

A mean trick? A test? A gaslighting? The fascinating thing about opening those questions immediately is that the story doesn’t rush to explain, though it also doesn’t try to vainly play up the mystery either. Grove is content to let the ambiguities stand and let the larger story play out. Gradually, as readers who’ve seen some of the daily trials and persecutions for Emma’s AMAB identity Ed, it’s easy to sympathize with those questions… and indeed with all the parts of the dialogue between alters Katina, Ed, and Emma, one protectively tough, one worn down, one aspirational, each given distinctness while recognizably evolving.

My own inner skeptic wondered if nearly a thousand pages of contentious therapy sessions would become either frustratingly circular or distressingly painful to read. While pain and frustration might be part of this reading experience, the book overwhelmingly sounds a more compassionate note. Rather than endless digging in an internal monologue of introspection, “The Third Person” becomes a story of how Grove’s identities interact, sometimes guarding, sometimes wrestling, sometimes wounding, to process pain and survive oppression and find selfhood. In the telling, Grove’s alters and Toby the doubting therapist might be infuriatingly close-minded or self-destructive, but the narrative breathes with an openness that grants acceptance to Grove’s process.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of how Grove accomplishes this remarkable compassion is the use of cartooning that is more Charles Schulz than Dave McKean, more Nagata Kabi than Junji Ito.

Toby is drawn as somewhat tiny and fidgety in his therapist’s chair, often with perplexed or skeptical or bewildered eyes. Under Grove’s frank but empathetic rendering, we can fathom Toby’s confusion. Toby’s an expert whose own transition affirmed the professional expertise that makes him a go-to for patients seeking referrals for hormone therapy. But when Toby encounters the dissociative identities that Ed, Emma, and Katina bring into the his office, all bets are off. Unfamiliar with DID, Toby’s uncertainties twist into interrogation that veers on abusiveness.

As I read, my own perceptions of Toby flew from sympathetic to horrified, from trust to villainy and back again. Grove’s narrative art is especially effective at unsettling our notions of Toby’s adequacy and competence, not because she dodges how complex her own case was, but because she makes plain the quandaries of Toby trying to treat what he did not understand. In the end, Emma and Toby’s relationship is no shining example of therapeutic healing. But Grove’s account doesn’t read to me like an expose of malpractice, but instead an honest chronicle that bears the potential to wedge open our skepticism.

There’s a peeling-the-onion feeling in a first read-through of “The Third Person” that speaks to Grove’s cartooning mastery, a deceptively simple style that pushes people and personalities to the fore. But the book rewards re-reading as well, from re-assessing the truth that emerges from the tête-à-tête, to admiring Grove’s pitch-perfect character design and acting. For me, a searingly honest window into the “coming-to-be” story for Grove was also a mirror to the multiplicity of parts– protective, wounded, courageous– that operate within myself, and there’s a magnificence to that both delicate and fearless. “The Third Person” is one of the most impactful books I’ve read in years.