Sociopath - Patric Gagne

This extraordinary memoir is well on its way to become my favorite read of the year.

Gagne describes an unshakable feeling of being different from other people from a young age, which sends her on a lifelong journey of self-discovery.

“My name is Patric Gagne and I am a sociopath.”

Gagne feels basic emotions like happiness and anger, while more complex emotions like guilt, empathy, remorse, and even love, are foreign to her. She describes the stress of not having natural access to these feelings as the cause of her compulsive acts of violence and destructive behavior such as stalking, stealing, hurting people and even animals. She gets to the root of her struggle when she reads about sociopathy in college.

“I am a criminal without a record. […] And I’ve written this book because I know I’m not alone.”

Throughout the book, Gagne grows emotionally from her childhood days where she builds awareness on her pressure to act out, to her adult self, developing an entire new treatment program for her sociopathy because, as she discovers, no such thing exists. Her willingness to learn about her condition and change her destiny is impressive to say the least.

Sociopathy is generally known to lead to criminal behavior, and ultimately, emprisonment. Gagne attempts to change this outlook for herself and others by digging deep into the subject matter, to the point of obtaining a PhD degree in psychology and becoming a therapist.

It made me really happy to read that Gagne realizes she is privileged to have the opportunity of unpacking this mystery of her condition. Had she been born into a different gender, race, or class, she might have ended up misunderstood and punished early on, hiding her self diagnosis and quest for betterment, just like most of her sociopath peers.

This is a book that I couldn’t put down, and I expect it to do very well. It is such a commendable effort to bring awareness to sociopathy, which isn’t even defined in the dictionary anymore, even though the word is casually used by society at large for people and their characteristics that don’t come close to what sociopaths really go through. For the first time, this book portrays the point of view of the sociopath and presents it as an illness that can be overcome.

I'm very grateful to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for the advance reader's copy. It means the world.