Les mille et une vies de Billy Milligan

In 1977, William Stanley "Billy" Milligan was arrested for the rape and robbery of three women on the Ohio State University campus. What looked like a straightforward case became one of the most extraordinary in American legal history when psychiatric examination revealed that Milligan lived with dissociative identity disorder — twenty-four separate personalities sharing one body, each with a distinct age, voice, skill set, and even nationality or gender.

Working closely with Milligan and his doctors, Hugo Award-winning novelist Daniel Keyes reconstructs both the crimes and the shattered life behind them. He introduces the "family" of alters — among them a protective strongman, a brilliant analyst, a frightened child who holds the pain, and the fused "Teacher" who can finally remember everything — and traces how a childhood of severe abuse may have splintered a single mind into many. Milligan would become the first person in U.S. history acquitted of a major crime by reason of insanity caused by multiple personality.

Told with novelistic momentum and unsettling intimacy, Keyes's true account is a haunting exploration of trauma, identity, and the limits of the law when confronted with a mind it was never designed to understand. This record is the French-language edition.