Starred review from June 3, 2013
An essential, unprecedented memoir by a law professor who is a clinically-diagnosed sociopath, these revelations from the pseudonymous Thomas deign to counter the label's public image. There are no tales of violent crime or unrecognizably perverse fantasies. Rather, her intelligent, measured prose conveys her message and her mindset yet betrays sociopathic characteristics: "While others were learning to play kickball, I learned to play people." Unlike those without this disorder, she has neither conscience nor remorse, manipulates to fulfill desires, and describes a lifetime of inability to relate to others' emotions. However, she is confident, charming, worries about having kids, and whether "they will be like me, and I worry even more that they will be not be like me." Sociopathic brains are structurally different from others, but the disorder's root causes are unknown. Thomas asserts that we have misunderstood a group that constitutes between one and four percent of the general population, and her arguments against using the diagnosis as an indicator of evil or a pre-emptive reason to imprison are a slam-dunk. This is a critical addition to narratives of mental illness, deepened by the awareness that we're reading someone whose most intense motivation is "acquisition, retention, and exploitation of power".
Starred review from September 30, 2013
Pseudonymous author M.E. Thomas paints for the casual observer an illustration of the world of the sociopath. Bereft of the inborn empathic abilities that most people possess, Thomas used her considerable aptitudes to create a functional, albeit predatory, life for herself—a life anchored in rules arrived at through applied reason rather than in morals. Narrator Bernadette Sullivan’s coolly amused tone effectively conveys Thomas’s charming, detached observations about her life. Calm and self-possessed, Sullivan leads us through Thomas’s narrative as the sociopath speculates about the causes of sociopathy, its implications, and the impact it has had on her life. By turns a confession, an examination, and a self-justification, the veracity of Thomas’s narrative is open to question—she is a self-confessed liar and manipulator—but however fictional or distorted the story may be, Sullivan’s presentation of it is undeniably seductive. A Crown hardcover.