Sociopath by Patric Gagne
A Memoir
Title: Sociopath: A Memoir
Author: Patric Gagne, PhD
Narrator: Patric Gagne
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication Year: 2024
ISBN: 9781797170770
Rating: 4 stars
This is another book that isn’t on my physical TBR, that I read and wrote the review for in December. I did have to wait on my hold on this audiobook at the library for several months, so it was on a TBR of a different kind.
When I hear the word “sociopath” a lot of things come to mind, and almost none of them are good. But apparently something like 1 in every 100 people (experts differ on this number) is actually a sociopath and not all sociopaths are the extremely violent murderers you see on shows like Law & Order. Patric Gagne, the author of this book, is a diagnosed sociopath and she isn’t that sort of person at all.
From an early age, Gagne knew she was different from other kids. Something about her seemed off-putting to them and she realized she didn’t feel things the same ways others did. That doesn’t mean that she didn’t feel things at all, but her lack of emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy quickly set her apart from her peers and caused her to act in ways that others defined as abnormal. She wasn’t evil though. As a child, she loved her family and was close to them. She did things considered to be “bad” like petty theft, sneaking out, and lying, but nothing truly reprehensible and she was always honest about her actions after the fact.
The problem for Gagne was that her lack of feeling and her lack of fitting in caused her to want to act out to relieve the pressure. She didn’t want to hurt others so she had to find other ways to break the rules to satisfy her needs. She spent years breaking into empty houses and when she got to college, she would steal cars from drunk frat guys for the evening to drive around Los Angeles, but have the cars back before the guys even sobered up enough to realize their cars were missing in the first place.
Gagne heard the word “sociopath” for the first time as a teenager and was intrigued by what the word could mean, but she was never able to find a good definition for the word. When it came up again in her college psychology class, she decided to do some more research. She was extremely interested in and dismayed by what she found. By the time Gagne was in college, sociopathy had been removed from the DSM. It was changed to Antisocial personality disorder (even though the symptoms and diagnostic criteria are different) and was often lumped in with psychopathy, even though the two are also different. Through years of research in undergrad, Gagne came to understand that she was a sociopath, but also came to think that sociopathy might actually be a spectrum disorder where people who are sociopaths can range from people like her who just don’t understand how to feel certain human emotions to those merciless serial killers we see on TV. Gagne loved learning about sociopathy and wanted to shed more light on the disease to help other people like her.
However, after college graduation, Gagne took a job in the music industry. She continued to do what she needed to do to relieve the pressure of her sociopathy, but she was outwardly a seemingly neurotypical person. She was good at her job, she was in a committed relationship with her high school sweetheart, and she had good friends. The important people in her life all knew about her diagnosis and while they all claimed to understand and support her, she constantly felt an undercurrent that they were just waiting and hoping for her to become “normal,” something that just couldn’t ever happen.
Eventually, after talking to her therapist, Gagne decided to leave the music industry to go back to grad school to get her PhD. She continued to study sociopathy and made some great strides in her research and as a therapist for other people like her—every day sociopaths who struggled with emotions, or lack thereof, but were still normal, good people. Her work provided meaning in her life and helped her see the need for more improvement and acceptance in her own relationships to strengthen them. Gagne was capable of feeling love and loved her friends and her fiancé, but to her, love means something different than it does to others and understanding these differences, it turns out, is essential to having open and loving relationships.
In addition to being a therapist, Gagne decided that to really help people struggling with sociopathy, she needed to go public with her own story. She struggled to find the words for her own experiences because her life and feelings didn’t match up with the sociopaths she saw in the media. She knew that other sociopaths needed to see someone like her in order to understand and put names to their own experiences to seek the help they need. So, she wrote a Modern Love column for The New York Times. The piece went viral and that success and ensuing visibility encouraged her to release this book, her memoir, that she had already written.
Gagne highlights in this book that from the outside she looks completely “normal.” She is a married mother of two with a dog and a cat. She has a job that she is passionate about. She loves her kids. She does the carpool. She is close with her sister. She has more in common with the PTA mom next door than she does with Ted Bundy. She is a sociopath, but she is also just a human being who struggles with emotions.
This book was so eye opening to me. Prior to reading it, if you had asked me what a sociopath is, I would have been pretty confident in my answer, but after reading it, I realized that I really don’t understand at all. One thing that is really driven home in the book is that while Gagne struggles to feel empathy, she does naturally feel empathy for other sociopaths and that really comes through to the reader. I also felt bad for people who, like Gagne, start out as children knowing they are different but not ever being able to figure out why or find a community of people like them. Gagne emphasizes that that is the real purpose of this book and her writing in general: so that other sociopaths trying to fit into their day-to-day lives can find her story. She wants to be the source of answers and the guiding light she was looking for her entire life.
I listened to the audiobook version which was narrated by Gagne herself. With memoirs especially, I like when they are read by the author so that I can fully grasp the author’s intended delivery and emphasis and I think that is even more important with this book. Like Gagne struggles to understand the thought processes and motivations of the non-sociopaths around her, I struggled a bit to understand what it would be like to not have fear or anxiety sometimes. I think to someone who isn’t a sociopath, it is so hard to imagine the experience of being a sociopath that it can almost sound fake at times, so hearing it in her voice makes it seem more authentic and real.
I also think it’s rare in books, fiction or nonfiction, to have a protagonist who doesn’t care whether or not you like them. It seems to me in most stories the reader is meant to either definitely like or dislike the main character because I think most people want to be liked or want to have the choice to be disliked if it better fits their motivations. Part of Gagne’s sociopathy is that she isn’t concerned with either being liked or disliked and that comes through in the book. I feel pretty ambivalent about her as a person. I didn’t agree with some of her actions and choices but others seemed justified or harmless enough that it was fine. I felt sympathetic to her in some parts and frustrated with her in others, but in about equal measure so that I’m not really left with any final impression of her—I’m just curious about her.
I have seen some reviews of this book where people are trying to push back against Gagne’s claims about sociopathy—about it being a spectrum disorder, about her diagnosis, and about her own therapy techniques. I’m not well versed enough in psychology to really dig down into this and make an informed opinion myself, but just for the record there is some dissent out there.
This book just felt so different to me and it kept me engrossed. I’m interested to see where this conversation about sociopathy takes us in the future, because I don’t think this is the end of the conversation.