Joseph Anton is primarily the story of the author’s time spent in exile after the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses had caused a fatwa to be issued against him, endangering his security and radically changing his concept of normal life for the space of nine years. It is a mostly compassionate voice, sometimes giving way to a heavy-handed foreboding that, despite our knowing how the story ends, does little to diminish its suspense. There’s a similar, nattering presence at work in Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, and it has a similarly ambiguous flavor to it. Years later, after Longden entered the field herself, she hit upon another theory: that the voice was not necessarily bad, but served as a sort of inner compass, a voice of suppressed or inconvenient reason, part of a seemingly ulterior self that struggles violently, vaguely, to combine all the disparate voices of the self into one, consistent whole. IN A RECENT TED TALK, psychologist Eleanor Longden describes being joined in a particularly stressful time in college by “a disembodied voice which calmly narrated everything did in the third person: She is reading, she is going to a lecture, she is leaving the room.” The voice was “neutral, banal, oddly companionate,” and when she told doctors about it, they linked it at once to schizophrenia, resulting in a period of institutionalization that did more harm than good.

This article originally appeared on the L.A.

Salman rushdie joseph anton a memoir