The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

“Charlie lived at the extreme of a dissociation of heart and mind. In listening to my father coolly describe the experiments he did on me as a young child, I experienced something I had already begun exploring in my research: how science and technology can make us forget what we know about life.”

In the Introduction, Turkle establishes The Need for Empathy in Science. She reflects on a personal encounter with her father, who unremorsefully reveals his mistreatment of her as a child. Throughout the memoir, Turkle connects personal anecdotes with her professional life and explores personal developments that led to her empathy research.

“When she married Charles Zimmerman in 1947, she took a year off her age on the marriage license, declaring herself twenty-eight. Six years later, when she married Milton Turkle, their marriage license had her at twenty-nine. When I found these documents, long after her death, I felt her presence, infuriating yet radiating confidence that any ‘reality’ could be claimed as real.”

Turkle explores the Pluralism of Identity, or how the way that we talk and interact changes how we see ourselves. She looks at her and mother’s relationship from different perspectives throughout the memoir. Discovering her mother’s things after her death is like finding a new “memory closet” of “evocative objects” that she sifts through to better understand who her mother was. Her mother’s fabrication of identity unsettles Turkle, who wonders if her mother’s life of secrets has made Turkle live in fantasy.

“The not-modern things about their life were comforting. I liked the early-morning walk that my grandfather called a ‘constitutional.’ My grandmother’s fully set table for Friday-night dinner. Her household remedies. Saltwater gargles. Lemon and honey. A drop of ipecac on the tongue. Hot milk at bedtime. None of these things followed us to Beach Haven.”

Turkle’s memories and fondness for her grandparents illustrate her idea about “evocative objects” and how they lead people to think about other ideas. Turkle conveys her connection to her identity as a Bonowitz through the items that shaped their relationship and reflects on the difference between modern and non-modern objects and people’s bodily interactions with them. This style of reminiscence demonstrates the theme of Self-Discovery Through “Evocative Objects.”

“There were many torn photographs. Once, I found a photograph with the body still there and the face cut out. I never asked whose face it was; I knew. And I knew enough never to mention the photograph, for fear it might disappear. It was precious to me. The image had been attacked, but it contained so many missing puzzle pieces.”

Turkle’s image of the headless father figure and use of the word “attacked” conveys the violence Turkle feels at being kept from knowing her father’s identity. The phrase “puzzle pieces” highlights the mystery that Turkle seeks to uncover. Turkle’s use of language creates a fragmented image of both her father and herself. She views herself as incomplete until she re-discovers her father as an adult.

“No one else had ever named Charles Zimmerman as my ‘father.’ Everyone else just called him Charlie. When the judge said, ‘your father,’ I immediately felt warmth toward him. ‘Your father.’ It sounded hopeful. As though I had one. I called Milton ‘Daddy.’ I wouldn’t have dared call him ‘Milton.’ But I arranged my mind so that the word ‘Daddy’ meant nothing to me.”

Turkle analyzes the emotional effect of the terminology used to represent her father. In Lacanian theory, language creates identity, which Turkle depicts by showing how language represented her relationships with Milton and Charlie. Her family’s refusal to call Charlie Turkle’s father created an absence. This caused Turkle to feel an uneasy sense of herself and increased her isolation.

“I think of this moment often because it had to be the first time I was given a clue that my mother was ill, and I chose to not pay attention. Or rather, I paid close attention and did what the grown-ups signaled they wanted from me: to pretend not to notice what was happening. I knew I could receive no comfort, because no one would admit that anything sad had happened. It was a very particular loneliness: knowing that people around you were also sad but that you couldn’t be sad together.”

Throughout the memoir, Turkle interprets and reinterprets the events of her mother’s cancer and death to better understand their relationship and grapple with guilt for not discovering her mother’s illness. In the opening chapters, Turkle looks at the past through a lens of childhood psychological development, noting the family influences that influenced her learned behavior. Her childhood lesson—that of “pretending not to notice”— foreshadows Turkle’s difficulties later in life when she ignores her husband’s infidelity.

“These bar mitzvahs celebrated that another generation of Jews was alive. Somehow we children understood this. No matter what our individual relationships with our parents or how distant we felt from them, we knew what we meant to them.”

Turkle’s Jewish heritage is a key influence on her later academic interests, where she studies collective thought, rituals, and attitudes to mourning. From a young age, she understands that her existence is a sign of the resilience and hope of the Jewish community after the Holocaust. This experience influences Turkle’s ideas about collective responses to trauma and its political ramifications as she considers the May revolt for her college dissertation.

“As Israeli politics turned more conservative, he comforted me by asking me to be empathic: When people are under daily siege, he said, they are overwhelmed by fear for themselves and their families instead of what is good for the country. They can lose their moral compass.”

Turkle recounts an early lesson in empathy in Hebrew school from Rabbi Wagner, who inspires Turkle’s interest in cultural history. By writing about her childhood learning in her memoir, Turkle aims to create a personal portrait of how her thinking and feelings developed. Turkle uses personal anecdotes to make her academic ideas more accessible. She creates connections between people and ideas.

“I hoped they could be friends. But there were limitations on what kind of friend I could be. I felt compelled to stay at a distance so people wouldn’t see things about me I wasn’t ready for them to see.”

Turkle adopts a frank, unsentimental tone when analyzing her own behavior, using short, declarative sentences and reporting her actions with the language of an analyst. She highlights the barriers to empathy and connection she learned from her childhood and mother, who curated her presence in the world.

“Looking back, I have compassion for the girl I was. She needed to change. She had the wrong temperament for her talents. At the time, she embarrassed me.”

Turkle examines events from her life that moved her from isolation to empathy. She is a first-person, older narrator who looks back on events of the past, highlighting the Pluralism of Identity—her younger self felt and thought differently than her older, wiser self. Turkle reflects on how her self-perception has changed, shifting from limited compassion to greater empathy and acceptance.

“I find it helpful to think about those days because it reminds me how sexism, like racism and authoritarianism, can seem invisible when it is the familiar. Harvard professors seemed to me the authorities on how to do experiments. And they were telling me that this was how experiments were done. This was the expected. The expected is invisible. To see your own culture, you have to make the natural unfamiliar.”

One of Turkle’s focuses is how to make the invisible visible through free associative talk and interview techniques that encourage people to discuss their way of thinking about themselves. She examines how “the natural” becomes “unfamiliar” by gaining distance from your own culture. She reiterates this when referencing the work of author James Baldwin, who encourages examining one’s own culture from the perspective of another. Turkle uses the motif of the outsider to depict the power of insight through distance from her subject.

“I think I was trying to act out my side of what should have been a conversation about other things. I had allowed her to live through me. But my interests were getting more political; it would no longer be a question of only telling her things that would please her. Now I would have to invent a parallel life. And I felt growing resentment about why I knew so much about Milton’s insecurities and nothing about my own father.”

Turkle depicts her shift from identifying with her mother to creating an independent sense of self at college. Her interaction with political theories and people interested in bold ideas changes her view of her mother’s world from acceptance and complicity to resistance.

“That was what I refused to read. When we don’t want to know the truth, we don’t hear the truth spoken to us.”

Turkle frequently uses aphorisms to sum up lessons learnt, signaling key insights into the psyche. These emphasize the meaning of Turkle’s personal history and deepen the links between the memoir and her academic theories. When Turkle reinterprets her aunt’s words in hindsight, she recognizes how her mind blocked difficult or painful truths to protect itself. This idea becomes more significant when she examines the events of her mother’s death and her marriage to Seymour Papert.

“My reaction to my mother’s death was to idealize her. I rehearsed to myself the good ways I was like her—feminine and intelligent, grateful for new experiences, eager to be seen by the world—and actively forgot, at least for a while, the things I didn’t like. Becoming my own person would mean remembering them, little by little, and learning to love and mourn her with full knowledge of them.”

Turkle’s initial reaction to her mother’s death is to construct a fantasy mother figure rather than recognize the reality. This positive image of her mother comforts her, like the fantasy image of her father, Charlie, that she had created when she was young. Turkle’s examination of her mother creates a fuller and more empathetic picture as she discovers different aspects.

“Ideas become what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called ‘objects to think with.’ They get picked up, sometimes in bits and pieces, and are used to propel action. And affiliation. I thought about this kind of study as ‘a sociology of superficial knowledge’—with the caveat that this knowledge is never superficial in the life of the individual.”

Turkle’s reference to Strauss’s theories adds a layer of intellectual discourse to her memoir. Throughout the book, she interweaves academic and personal styles of writing. Turkle’s understanding of events does not remain fixed throughout the memoir but changes as she introduces new ideas.

“It was in Cologne, where a lively city had been left a bombed-out shell, that I finally felt a grief about World War II that included Germans. The moment seemed important. I went to a city park and took a photograph of a swan that I carried with me for years. Just from looking at the photograph, it could have been a swan from the Boston Public Garden. But I knew what it was.”

The picture of the swan in the park becomes an “evocative object” that Turkle can return to look at again and again and that interacts with ideas about identity, war, and loss. The contrast between “lively” and “bombed-out” emphasizes the destruction of war and conveys Turkle’s compassion for the German people. In reframing the Germans, Turkle focuses on their commonality with Jewish individuals. She sees the Germans as sharing trauma rather than blaming them. This is where Turkle’s identity forks from that of her family, who make choices based on their traumatic response to the past.

“When people built online identities that were braver or more adventurous than who they were in ‘real life,’ they did not feel that they had multiple personality disorder. On the contrary, they told me that in ‘real life’ they tried to associate themselves with the strengths of their online creations.

French-speaking Sherry was not unrecognizable, but she was her own person. There was no space in her world for doubts that she could take care of herself.”

Turkle moves between the world of her professional life and her personal experience. She compares the concept of online identity as a projection of desired personality traits to her experience with using language as a medium to construct an alternate identity. Turkle’s research concepts shape her real life, allowing her a Pluralism of Identity that helps her survive as an outsider.

“But many girls (and a fair number of boys) preferred to program in the style I used for writing, the tinkering style that I called bricolage or ‘soft mastery,’ paying my respects to Lévi-Strauss. You try one thing and then another; you make false steps and then revise.”

Turkle’s interest in reflecting about her thought process shapes her style of memoir writing; she discusses the process of writing by writing about it. Turkle frequently applies the technique of “bricolage,” borrowing from different aspects of her social selves to construct a new, hybrid identity. In her writing, Turkle quotes ideas from many different intellectual fields and moments in her life to construct the story of how she develops empathy.

“How we prepare ourselves to see the world determines the world we see. When, later, I found engineers approaching human problems with engineering solutions, their narrowness of vision did not surprise me. They were acting in the same tradition as the sociologists and political scientists who projected their pet theories onto May.”

Turkle uses another aphoristic statement: “How we prepare ourselves to see the world determines the world we see.” This highlights the human tendency to approach new data with confirmation bias. She explores The Need for Empathy in Science and criticizes the inflexibility of technological specialists to adapt and consider the nuances of human thought and feeling.

“[O]nly people live in human bodies, have human life cycles, and are born to nurturing human mothers. Only people start out little in a world of grown-ups and grow up to be big, facing a new generation that they must nurture with what they have learned on their journey. Only people know pain and illness. Only people fear death.”

Turkle uses a literary technique called anaphora, which is when a speaker or writer repeats a word or sequence of words at the beginning of a series of sentences or phrases. In this case, she repeats the phrase “Only people.” Turkle builds her argument that there is a singularity of human experience, one that cannot be recreated by machinery. She argues for The Need for Empathy in Science in opposition to scientists such as Minsky, who disregard human connection in favor of a future in which humans merge with machinery.

“He didn’t know how to be a father, but while I was growing up, my connection to the idea of him, to a fantasy that he had somehow been special, a scientist father, had given me courage. That was worth a lot. And Charlie brought something unexpected: a reconciliation with my long-dead mother. She’d faced the reality of Charlie’s deprivation experiments and said no. And I now understood why she had devoted herself, clumsily but passionately, to keeping me from him. She had protected me.”

The death of Turkle’s biological father frees Turkle to reconsider the father fantasy figure that she had constructed during her childhood. The difference between her fantasy and experience of him in real life shifts her perspective of her mother’s secrecy from selfishness to protection. Turkle changes her thinking through the “evocative objects” of her father and mother.

“Since the rules never seemed natural, I believed things could be another way. I developed an outsider’s clarity. I carried it with me beyond childhood. I was a stranger at Radcliffe, certainly. And in France. I grew into a braver woman, developing strengths through a life lived more as a visitor than as someone who feels at home.”

Turkle uses the motif of the outsider to highlight the importance of distance for clearer insight. Turkle portrays her isolation, caused by the secrecy of her father’s identity, as a strength that shapes her career and research. By repeatedly interacting with new ways of thinking that are foreign to her, Turkle builds a Pluralism of Identity that allows her keener insight into her own culture.

“Writing this book was another kind of displacement and brought its own discoveries, among the most precious a new appreciation for my mother’s complexity. She had to face that Charlie used me for his experiments, deprived me of his voice, attention, and touch. Did she feel that by not learning of them sooner, she bore responsibility?”

Turkle uses rhetorical questioning—"Did she feel that by not learning of them sooner, she bore responsibility?”—to depict how she sought to understand her mother’s actions. Her language—“his voice, attention and touch”—emphasizes the loss of fatherly connection and the cruelness of Charlie’s experiments. Turkle compares the writing of a memoir to displacement. The concept of dépaysement evokes the idea that writing is a way to make the familiar unfamiliar and to approach it with fresh insight.