Sociopath: A MEmoir
By Kaliane Bradley

This memoir was fascinating but terribly irksome in its contradictions. Throughout the account, Gagne refers to her “diagnosis” of sociopathy, despite mentioning that the term is outdated and no longer used. She rejects the contemporary diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder and stubbornly clings to the term “sociopath” for what seems like little more than her own confirmation bias.

She criticizes journalists for jumping to sociopathy “despite having no training or qualifications to do so,” indicating that her own PhD and research may be more credible, regardless of the fact that, being an outdated term, technically nobody is qualified to diagnose anyone with sociopathy.

After repeatedly asserting she has no conscious feelings of love, guilt, compassion, remorse or shame, she goes on to describe specific instances in which she feels all of the above, even noting the reason for writing the memoir in the first place as a product of her desire to help other “sociopaths”.

She states that people who care what others think of them “annoy the shit” out of her and yet she credits the only catalyst to changing her behavior as her intrinsic need for other people not to think she’s “bad”.

The prose that comprises this memoir is an ironically passionate description of “apathy”. Perhaps the most shameless thing Gagne has done is to defiantly identify with the term “sociopath” in the first place.

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