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‘Confessions of a Sociopath,’ by M. E. Thomas
Jonathon Rosen
By JON RONSON
Published: June 14, 2013
As a teenager, M. E. Thomas — a fittingly egotistic pseudonym — was “so uniquely accomplished, talented and charming that I was naturally included on everyone’s list of people to know.” She went to indie movies and drummed in a rock band. Her friends idolized her. “Musicians are expected to be narcissistic and outrageous,” she writes. “You’re supposed to scream and dance wildly.” Nobody suspected that the screaming and the wild dancing were indicative not of awesomeness but of sociopathy.
CONFESSIONS OF A SOCIOPATH
A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight
By M. E. Thomas
302 pp. Crown Publishers. $25.
In “Confessions of a Sociopath,” Thomas self-identifies “more as a sociopath than by my gender or profession or race.” People like her are “different from the average person, often in very dangerous or scary ways.” It’s startling to read these statements written so bluntly. As a healthy skepticism of mental health labeling grows, some people question whether sociopaths and psychopaths (Thomas is described in an evaluation as a “ ‘socialized’ or ‘successful’ psychopath”) actually exist, beyond being pejorative terms to describe horrible people. This book dispels that myth.
It is practically unheard-of for a sociopath to write a memoir — about being a sociopath, I mean.
There are presumably lots of memoirs by sociopaths about other things, like how to succeed in business. So I tore through this. How candid would Thomas be about her feelings — or lack of them? Could she solve mysteries that vex clinicians, like how to rein in her criminal counterparts’ notoriously high recidivism rates? (She considers herself a noncriminal sociopath.) Besides, can she write well? Could someone with a clinical absence of emotional depth pull off a book?
In my experience they can make the best and the worst interviewees. At best their skewed charisma makes them beguiling and quick-witted. Their cruelty can teach us important things about the cruelty of the wider world. And they’re human — and all humans have positive attributes. But at their worst their grandiosity quickly grates. Their charm — defined by the Hare PCL-R checklist, the gold standard of psychopathy diagnosis, as “glib and superficial” — can make them more boring than they think they are.
Where would Thomas fall?
“Confessions of a Sociopath” turns out to be an intermittently gripping and important book — albeit one that sags dramatically in the middle when the author goes on for ages about her not especially interesting childhood. (Here she tries to solve the nature/nurture mystery and concludes that she doesn’t know, but that her sociopathy is probably due to a bit of both.) Otherwise, it is a revelatory if contradictory muddle of a memoir in which she succeeds in simultaneously humanizing and demonizing herself.
Such is the intense stigma that comes with the label, it’s understandable she adopts a pseudonym. But it means we have only her word that Thomas is the woman she says she is: a sociopath as well as “an accomplished attorney and law professor,” who is just as comfortable “in summer dresses as I am in cowboy boots,” is super-popular — “in a world filled with gloomy, mediocre nothings,” people “are attracted to the sociopath’s exceptionalism like moths to a flame” — has “never had an insecurity,” feels no anxiety and possesses “remarkably beautiful breasts.” She rarely lets her pristine mask slip to reveal the gaping nothingness underneath.
Although the mask does slip sometimes. There was the occasion she came down with appendicitis and went to school in such pain she forgot to mimic her peers’ social niceties and instead “stared at them with the dead eyes I had previously reserved for when I was alone.” More recently, when a city worker berated her for using an off-limits escalator, Thomas found herself following him, a “metallic” taste in her mouth, fantasizing about murder and “how right that would feel.” She turned around only when she lost sight of him in the crowd. “I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to actually kill him,” she says, “but I’m also relatively certain I would have assaulted him.” Although sociopaths are relentlessly self-interested, the logic of punishment frequently eludes them. They’re their own worst enemies — reckless, suffering poor precautionary controls,never learning their lesson. Thomas has lost count of the times she’s gotten sick from eating rotten food because the “risk of injury never sinks in.”
Despite all her claims of Spock-like rational genius, you are frequently reminded that this is a book written by a damaged person. For instance, there’s the implausible claim that although Thomas “has always lived in the worst neighborhoods,” she doesn’t need to worry about her pension because she’s one of the world’s greatest stock-market speculators, averaging a 9.5 percent return. “Beating the market this soundly and consistently is unheard-of,” she writes, putting her success down to her “special vision. When I look at the world, the flaws or vulnerabilities in people and the social institutions that they’ve made jump out at me.”
During passages like this it’s worth remembering that pathological lying and lack of realistic long-term goals are two of the items on the Hare checklist. And Thomas’s claims of leading a moral life are undermined somewhat by the cheerful accounts of some chillingly cruel deeds she’s committed, from leaving a baby opossum to drown in her swimming pool — “I did not give it a thought” — to the time she cut off all ties to a friend whose father was dying of cancer because the woman wasn’t fun to be around anymore.
By the book’s final stretch — Thomas’s reminiscences of a hedonistic year abroad in Brazil and her loveless sexual shenanigans — my patience began to wear thin. There’s only so many ways someone can say she doesn’t care about other people’s feelings. Sociopaths are all surface, and so at times is this book. By the end you feel like the partner of a sociopath. You’ve had quite the memorable roller coaster ride, but now you’re sick of the chilliness and the self-absorption, and you want out.
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