SOCIOPATH: A Memoir, by Patric Gagne
That Patric Gagne is a sociopath isn’t news. She wrote about it for The New York Times’s Modern Love column, which led to a deal for a book that I have just hurled across the room like a discus, and an extensive pre-publication interview with my colleague David Marchese.
Gagne seems also to be afflicted, or blessed, with hyperthymesia, a.k.a highly superior autobiographical memory: a rare condition publicized in an old “60 Minutes” segment featuring the actress Marilu Henner.
How else, unless Gagne was concealing a small tape recorder on her person since childhood (not out of the question, of course, for a sociopath) does she recall decades-old dialogue in such precise detail? And incidentally, how come so much of that is rat-a-tat banter suitable for a corny ’90s rom-com?
“I’d kill myself if everywhere I went, people knew who I was,” Gagne, who in young adulthood follows her father into the music business, tells a flirtatious rock guitarist to whom she’s confided her sociopathy.
“Instead of killing other people, you mean?” he replies.
Rimshot!
The ostensible goal of “Sociopath,” as the memoir is titled in dramatic Sharpie letters on the cover, is to address exactly this sort of misconception, to destigmatize an oft-misunderstood personality type. Most of Gagne’s kind are not murderers. She argues that sociopathy is a spectrum disorder, like autism, affecting “millions,” though there’s no source for this number; citation in “Sociopath” is not footnotes but excited “flipping” through library books.
Other than stabbing a “neighborhood terror” in the head with a pencil when she was in second grade, flinging a glass pitcher at a wall and occasionally clawing herself in frustration to the point of bleeding, Gagne has tended to be more creepy than violent in her transgressive behavior. Relief from a certain temperamental blankness has come, she writes, by breaking into other people’s homes and joyriding in their dubiously borrowed cars.
“The silence of a structure that has just been broken into is unlike any other,” the author writes, adding with unnerving humanization, “It’s almost like the house can’t believe what just happened and has gasped, taking all the air with it.”
Gagne tells of stealing and stockpiling trivial objects, like a pair of Ringo Starr’s glasses when she was a toddler, and as an adult a Statue of Liberty key chain that she used to signal to her watchful then-boyfriend, David, when she’d done something “unorthodox.” (David, no saint, also joined her for sex in the empty houses.) Gagne mulled filching a life-size ceramic tiger from Hugh Hefner’s office during a party at the Playboy Mansion, but settled for a notepad.
Some people crash weddings for the free food and drinks; she sneaks into funerals, strangers’ grief washing over her like a spa cleanse. There’s an elaborate subplot about Gagne stalking a woman named Ginny who’s trying to extort her father, the revelation that causes the obviously enchanted guitarist to do a “spit take.” (Spit takes being about as common in real life as rimshots.)
Indeed a large swath of “Sociopath” is devoted to Gagne’s ability to succeed amid the “dark magic” of the music business, which, we’re reminded, tends to attract difficult personalities such as that guitarist (she dubs him Max Magus), for whom she may or may not be leaving dependable David.
You’ve heard the phrase “has no chill.” Gagne portrays herself as all chill: a “blond, ferret-toting Wednesday Addams,” as she writes of an upbringing stressed by divorce and a move to Florida.
Her younger sister, Harlowe, nicknames her Captain Apathy, drawing a cartoon of a masked superhero. (Somebody dial Mattel!) Like Diana in “A Chorus Line,” Patric feels nothing — happiness and anger in brief spurts, maybe, but not empathy or remorse, a syndrome she likens to bad eyesight.
She does, however, curse an awful lot, sometimes in ALL CAPS. One woman is dismissed as a “basic bitch” and worse. Repetition and weather reports (“the breeze whistled its approval as I approached the sports car”) blight the narrative. And when Gagne, now a clinical psychologist and married mother of two, writes of her longing for incarceration (“a short stint in lockup sounded interesting”), one wishes someone had gently placed a few more studies on her library pile.
Sociopathy is no longer indexed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Gagne writes, replaced by antisocial personality disorder, several criteria of which don’t resonate with her. She guards her medical identity like a ceramic tiger, scornfully labeling a messy record-label executive named Jennifer a “fauxciopath.”(A term the author is attempting to trademark.)
I have little problem with “Sociopath” as a porthole into the unusual mind of one woman — albeit a smudged porthole; she admits to changing names, dates and details. It’s when Gagne swerves the wheel of that purloined auto into the scholarly realm, speeding through the psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley’s 1941 seminal work on psychopathy, “The Mask of Sanity,” and topics like cognitive behavioral therapy, that sweat begins to bead on my boringly neurotypical forehead.
Those Sharpie letters proclaim a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, but since her dissertation is not available online, nor referenced by other scholars, “Sociopath” is venturing out into the hot media lights uncomfortably alone. This is an important topic, treated too flightily: begging for peer review, not book review.
SOCIOPATH: A Memoir | By Patric Gagne | Simon & Schuster | 368 pp. | $28.99
