Daily Life, Sans Ethnography

The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir by Sherry Turkle.  Penguin Press.  348 pp.  $28.00.  ****

I’m having an odd experience with The Empathy Diaries.  I absolutely loved reading the book night after night, but as I look back find it difficult to put into words what I liked so much.  Not normally my problem.  Sherry Turkle is my exact contemporary, both of us born in 1948, so we lived through the same historical moment, Howdy Doody and Kukla Fran and Ollie on the television in our childhoods, the Cold War in our youth, Viet Nam and protests in our college years (though she somehow got to college a year ahead of me.  She was brainy).

Turkle’s life was extraordinary in many ways; she went to Radcliffe as a scholarship student, studied a variety of subjects with well-known people like David Reisman, spent time in France and actually knew Jacques Lacan, and wound up on the faculty of MIT, not as a scientist, but as a social scientist specializing in “the intimate ethnography of everyday life,” not a phrase I could have formulated, but a fascinating subject nevertheless.

She has specialized in seeing the way computers and other gadgets have made us different people, and has a real critique of what they’ve done (making her an outlier at MIT, where people apparently enjoy thinking of themselves as machines).  She was at first denied tenure, perhaps because she seemed anti-tech, or perhaps because she was a woman (the only one in her department), but she fought back and won the appeal.  A colleague actually told her it was a mistake to publish her second book with Simon and Schuster rather than an academic press (!).  I think the men were just jealous of her.

What I loved about this book was that she was so good at writing about everyday life, the simple life she led as a girl and young woman.  Her mother had abandoned her father early on, moving back in with her parents, and though they lived a modest life in small dwellings, they spent most of the year in Brooklyn but the summers at the beach in Rockaway, a part of Queens.  Her mother remarried when Sherry was five, and she was in the odd position of being Shirley Zimmerman at school, because she had enrolled that way, and Sherry Turkle everywhere else.  She had to conceal that double identity even from her stepbrother and sister.  It was a bizarre situation (as bizarre as the fact that, in order to educate her, or liberate her, something, her mother insisted she take a shower with her new stepfather, apparently to note the anatomical differences.  She was five years old.  What can I say, parents had weird ideas in the fifties).

As soon as Sherry heard about Harvard—or Radcliffe, where she would have to go—she knew she wanted to go there.  She also knew her family could never afford the place.  But she didn’t miss a beat, figured that if she was the number one student at her New York high school she’d qualify for a scholarship, so she determined to do that, and did.  She makes it sound effortless.

There still wasn’t much money when she got to college, but she managed to do whatever she wanted, traveled to France to study Derrida and Lacan at an age when I never would have undertaken such a task (still wouldn’t, to be honest), and she did fine in that hyper-intellectual world.

She calls attention to various family secrets—the real reason her mother left her father, the whole weird thing about her two last names—but the one secret I understood was that, for ten years, almost until her death, Sherry’s mother hid from her the fact that she had breast cancer, and had had a radical mastectomy.  Sherry didn’t even suspect it.  My own parents made the same decision about my father’s leukemia, not telling my brother and me until six months before his death, when I was sixteen.  Sherry’s mother didn’t want her daughter to have her life ruined by her mother’s illness.  She was a remarkable woman and a brave one.  She died a few years after my father did, when Sherry was in college.

Perhaps the strangest single episode in Sherry’s life was her first marriage, to a seductive and charming man who was twenty years older, an MIT professor named Seymour Papert.  She described her falling in love, and I could see it.  I could also see what she was missing (it was right there in front of her, but love is like that), the way he was similarly seductive and charming with everyone, including a number of other women, and the way he was extraordinarily undependable.  She gives only one major anecdote about that, but it’s a zinger.  On an evening when she was cooking for a dinner party they were giving, expecting him to arrive by 7:00 PM with the special wine they needed, she and her guests finally went ahead with dinner with a wine the guests had bought only to hear from Papert after 8:00.  Not only had he forgotten the dinner party, he was in Kennedy airport, on his way to Tunesia, because of a single entrancing conversation he’d had at MIT that afternoon.  I’ve known undependable people, but this guy raised the bar.  Or perhaps lowered it.

I was surprised that Turkle glided over the rest of her career so quickly, perhaps because she’s so well-known and her other books cover the ground.  She’s been an important thinker in her field, was Ms. Magazine’s woman of the year, and has—that rite of passage for all truly notable people—given a TED talk.

But what I loved about this book was the account of her childhood and youth.  I’d read it again for that alone.