Sherry Turkle - The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

Advance Praise for The Empathy Diaries

This is a scintillating memoir. Turkle acts at once as storyteller, ethnographer, and psychologist of her own lifeone stretching from a straitened Brooklyn Jewish girlhood shadowed by an unspeakable secret to a womanhood of academic accomplishment amidst the excitements of Radcliffe, Harvard, Chicago, and Paris in the years after the upheaval of 68 and MIT just as our computer world is born. Along the way she gives us a vivid account of ideas crucial to the last half-century of intellectual life, tracing their inner history with bracing clarity.

Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love and Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors

By respecting her own emotional, social, and intellectual history with carefuleven lovingattention, Sherry Turkle shows what rescue from the crisis of technological disconnect looks like. Intimate, compassionate, and critical, her book instructs, edifies, and heals. A paradigmatic personal narrative, yet The Empathy Diaries is a tour de force of social science, saluting and protecting the precious intangibility that no machine can matchthe quality that makes us human.

James Carroll, author of The Truth at the Heart of the Lie

Like a Harvard educated Nancy Drew, Sherry Turkle searches her past for clues to her true self and hits the mother lode in this fascinating, fearless memoir. Her struggle with the legacy of long-held family secrets as she forges her own unique path to authenticity and forgiveness is a story countless women will identify with. Reading The Empathy Diaries, I felt my mindand my heartexpanding. Sherry Turkle is not only a great writer and teachershes great company.

Winnie Holzman, cowriter of the hit musical Wicked; creator of the television series My So-Called Life

Use concrete events to think about large ideas. Use large ideas to think about concrete events. Sherry Turkle follows the advice of her professor, Samuel Beer, and The Empathy Diaries is the compelling result. The stages of Turkles narrative unfold so gracefully, in prose of such candor and clarity, that its easy to overlook how many tasks this memoir performs. The Empathy Diaries is about a childhood and a coming-of-age. Its about a courtship and marriage. Its also about the progress of Turkles engagement in the dynamic and overlapping fields in which this professor of social sciences, science, and technology is a crucial, authoritative, and, yes, empathetic voice. In every way, this is a book about an education. Fans of Turkles earlier work will certainly want to read The Empathy Diaries; but so too should everyone struggling in the cyber maze in which we find ourselves. A remarkable book.

Rachel Hadas, PhD, Board of Governors Professor of English, Rutgers UniversityNewark

I read it with delight. An honest, insightful, compelling, and sometimes painful account of the intellectual and emotional forces that shaped Turkle into a pioneer in the study of digital culture and how computers change the way we think about ourselves. Turkles is not only a personal story, but also a story of our digital age.

Alan Lightman, Professor of the Practice of the Humanities, MIT; author of Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

Sherry Turkle has been daring and original for a long timebearing witness to the emergence of artificial intelligence but also writing forcefully, while surrounded by true believers at MIT, about its limitations. In The Empathy Diaries, she dares even further by investigating a tightly held family secret, affirming in the process the wisdom of the human heart. The Empathy Diaries tells a fascinating storyone that manages to be profound and entertaining at the same time.

Susan Quinn, author of Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

Over the decades, Sherry Turkle has provided the most penetrating analyses of the relations between the human and the computational worlds. In a remarkably revealing memoir, Turkle explores the personal as well as scholarly sources of her understandings and, in the process, provides a brilliant panorama of our time.

Howard Gardner, author of A Synthesizing Mind

PENGUIN PRESS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright 2021 by Sherry Turkle

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Photo credits

, courtesy of Duncan Davidson/TED

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Turkle, Sherry, author.

Title: The empathy diaries: a memoir / Sherry Turkle.

Description: New York: Penguin Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020025410 (print) | LCCN 2020025411 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525560098 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525560104 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Turkle, Sherry. | PsychologistsUnited StatesBiography. | Empathy. | TechnologySocial aspects.

Classification: LCC BF109.T86 A3 2021 (print) | LCC BF109.T86 (ebook) | DDC 150.92 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025410

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025411

My general policy in this book is to use real names, usually first names, until graduate school friendships when I begin to use full names. When discussing a public connection, for example, my teachers, I use full names. When I thought I was discussing sensitive material, I asked individuals how they wished to be identified and followed their preferences. If they were not available, I chose a pseudonym.

pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

To Rebecca and Ben: the future