INVENTING MARK TWAIN

AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK "INVENTING MARK TWAIN"
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Traditional interpretation of the man dictated that Clemens had such a large personality that he needed a separate persona in which to carry it. That premise seemed… fundamentally false. Anyone who has ever performed, whether on the stage or at a dinner party, knows that maintaining a false persona places a huge strain on one’s ego. The larger the ego, in fact, the more difficult it becomes to sustain the invention. To live as someone else, to fully inhabit an invented self, the root self must have nearly no ego, or at least one so handicapped by insecurities that it might as well not exist. It became clear… that Sam Clemens could play Mark Twain to such success for so long only because his fundamental self was so unstable and uncertain. This hollowness at Clemens’ core resulted from the odd configuration of his childhood.