There is a slight flash in her eyes as Patric Gagne describes what she calls the “tug” – the moment she imagines something she really shouldn’t do and thinks: “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
She laughs. What would once have been a compulsion can now be overpowered by logic and consequences. “You want to take that car for a joyride? Yes, but if I did that, I’m probably going to have to answer for it. And do I want to? Not really.” This isn’t to say that Gagne wouldn’t jump at an opportunity, if she could argue she wasn’t at fault. It happened recently, she says. Waiting for her car, parked by a valet, she was given the keys to someone else’s and drove off in it. “They handed me the keys! And then I was like” – she puts on a mock-surprised voice – “‘Oh, this is not my car.’” Her husband, when he heard, “didn’t love it”, she says. She smiles as if to say: but what did he expect?
In 2020, Gagne featured in the New York Times’s Modern Love series with the headline: “He married a sociopath. Me.” This led to her memoir, Sociopath, in which she writes about her lack of empathy and other emotions, and the destructive compulsions that once threatened to overwhelm her.
The term sociopath is widely understood in popular culture – the chilly and ruthless politician or CEO or, at its most extreme, the serial killer – but it isn’t an official diagnosis. In the UK, it’s an outdated term, now under the umbrella of antisocial personality disorder, which also includes psychopathic traits. Gagne has never been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. In the US, she was labelled a sociopath by a psychologist who got her to take the psychopathy checklist assessment, often used with offenders.
Sociopaths, if we persist with the term, have a bad reputation – not undeserved, she acknowledges – but she wanted to offer up the inner life of someone struggling, who didn’t want to hurt people or do destructive things, and who did want to have fulfilling relationships. “I was driven by the need to help others like me understand who they are, why they are.”
We speak over video call, Gagne at home on the east coast. She is compelling, like a movie character – a sociopath who’s beautiful, warm and funny, articulate and charming. She’s a self-confessed liar, but her book details a woman struggling against her urges, and her deceit is largely about masking to fit in – not deployed, as far as I can tell, for power and control. (Mind you, might a sociopath make me want to believe that?)
Can she recognise other sociopaths? “Not really,” she says. “People want to believe that sociopaths are all evil and it makes them easy to spot, therefore they’re safe. People don’t want to admit they might be working with a sociopath, sleeping next to a sociopath, they might have birthed a sociopath. But my goal is to take the stigma away from so that we can have a more complete conversation about it.”
In her university library, Gagne struggled to find much about sociopathy. Older books made more sense to her. Reading a book written by a psychiatrist in the 1940s, the personality characteristics listed – including lack of remorse or shame, unreliability and untruthfulness – made sense to her. “I remember reading these studies, some of which were decades old, and thinking, ‘Why aren’t people talking about this?’”
Other mental disorders get a lot of research and therefore treatment, but not, she realised, antisocial personality disorder. Even though early intervention could prevent destructive behaviour, and could revolutionise the criminal justice system, she says: “I think because these words have become synonymous with evil, people’s compassion for them automatically drops. There’s no incentive to help.”
Where, she says with a smile, is empathy for sociopaths? “When you are a sociopathic kid, nobody’s empathising. Sociopaths are villainised for failing to demonstrate the exact same emotion they have never received themselves.” That feeling of hopelessness, she thinks, can be “a driving force in the escalation of destructive behaviour”. But the sociopaths we hear about “are the extreme examples, and by only focusing on the extreme, we continue to exacerbate the problem. The majority of people who fall on the sociopathic spectrum fall on the moderate side, for whom treatment is possible, and that’s what I want them to know.”
For Gagne, it felt reassuring to put a name to her experience – however much disagreement there is about it – and to see that it could be improved. Her treatment included cognitive behavioural therapy. “For me, there is nothing inherently immoral about having limited access to emotion – it’s not what we feel, it’s what we do. If destructive behaviour is at play, the behaviour needs to be addressed, first and foremost.” Left untreated, it doesn’t mean people become career criminals, she says, “but they’re certainly going to employ unhealthy coping mechanisms”.
Gagne did not become a career criminal – she worked in the music industry, then was a therapist before she became a writer and advocate – but she had her moments. She was a compulsive thief and joyrider. As a child, she stabbed another girl in the head with a pencil. This wasn’t, she insists, “rooted in a drive to inflict pain. I just remember feeling this pressure building, and this girl just happened to be standing next to me when the dam burst. Certainly she was grating on me in that moment but I wasn’t trying to hurt her specifically.” The act, she says, “resulted in a pressure release that I’d never experienced. Certainly, I can look back and can think logically that I wish she hadn’t had to suffer in order for me to get that release.”
Gagne grew up in California, where her father was an executive in the music industry; then, after her parents split up, on the east coast. She remembers realising she was different from other people, “really early – just a subtle awareness that I wasn’t experiencing things the way my classmates were, their emotional reactions were very different than mine. And certainly my family’s.”
She observed and imitated her younger sister’s behaviour, and that of other children at school, especially in relation to emotions. “It was almost like learning a language,” says Gagne. “I would try to figure out the socially appropriate way to respond.”
It wasn’t deliberately manipulative, she says. “I understand that someone who is frequently dishonest, you’re automatically going to equate that with evil, or someone who’s out to get you, but that really was not the case. I didn’t have the social tools everyone else seemed to have, so I mimicked theirs – an antisocial child trying to survive in a pro-social world.” Did she have many friends? “Not really, but I was OK with it.”
She loved her family – “The sociopathic personality isn’t incapable of making those connections” – especially her younger sister. “We were just buddies from the start. I also didn’t have that jealousy that comes with a lot of sibling relationships.” Gagne was thrilled that her younger sister took attention away from her. “I think without that rivalry element, we were able to exist cooperatively.”
At 14, at a holiday camp, she met another teenager, David. They had a brief relationship before getting together years later; they’re now married and have two children. Before him, did she think she would be able to feel love for a partner? “My concern was: is this going to be a real relationship or am I going to have to fake it 90% of the time? Is there anyone out there with whom I will be able to be completely myself?”
Did she worry about becoming a mother? “I remember holding out hope that when my first child was born, I would have that instant connection I had read about in books and seen in movies. When that didn’t happen, I felt very disappointed: ‘Is this going to be a situation where I can’t connect?’ But ultimately, I love my kids. I didn’t experience that instant connection, but I learned other women who do not have a sociopathic personality also experience that.” She knew, she says, from the experience with her family and husband that she was capable of love. “So I never worried that I wouldn’t love my children.”
Gagne finds it hard to describe how her urges felt (she doesn’t have them to the same degree now). When she was younger, she struggled with her feeling of apathy, a greyish world, and, she writes: “doing something I knew was morally unacceptable was a way to force a pop of colour”. It was also that feeling of release. Was there a pattern to the compulsions? “It didn’t become concrete for me until later, but if I tried to ignore [the urge or pressure], I had less control over the behaviour.”
Gagne realised, she says, that regular, smaller acts of deviance would prevent a larger blow-out. She came up with a list of “rules”, of which the first was “no hurting anybody”. “I think it was important for me to set those boundaries, because they weren’t inherent,” she says. “I knew what was right and wrong, but I was missing those complex emotional systems that tend to keep people in check. I had to write it down and talk myself through it. What is bad in the big sense? That was easy: violence.” Instead, she would stalk strangers on the street (if they were unaware, she reasoned, it wouldn’t hurt them), truant from school and let herself into the houses her mother, an estate agent, had access to. Later, she taught herself to pick locks.
But there were slips. Once she picked up a cat in the street and squeezed it harder and harder, feeling, she writes, “euphoric” before she let it go. It frightened her – she didn’t want to hurt animals. There are other things she left out of the book; I’d love to know what they are, given that she does include disturbing things such as breaking into the property of a woman who is trying to extort money from her and attending strangers’ funerals, drawn in by the mourners’ heightened emotions.
“My husband and I made a deal that I wouldn’t show the pages to anyone else before he looked at them,” she says. “There were occasions where I would write something and he would come in with a horrified expression, like: you can’t show this, burn your computer. My editor jokes that he wants to get his hands on what he calls ‘David’s vault’. Even now I will say something or admit to something that someone who is neurotypical is going to find horrifying, but it just doesn’t register that way to me.”
At university in Los Angeles, Gagne continued her acts of deviance but she was struggling to understand her urges. At one point she jumped from her window – not a serious attempt at suicide, she now thinks, more a hope that it would somehow incapacitate her. “Maybe if I was somehow compromised physically, I would no longer be at the mercy of my compulsions. I don’t feel that way any longer, because I am very much in control of my behaviour. I have a greater understanding of my personality type.”
After university, Gagne worked in the music industry. Does she think that world attracts sociopaths? “If it’s not a job prerequisite, it’s certainly recommended. I think it helps to have moral flexibility in certain fields, and the music industry is definitely one of them. But that’s why I made the decision not to pursue that career. It is sort of unchecked, and it was better to spend my time in a more structured environment that had clearer boundaries.”
So Gagne studied for a PhD, and became a therapist. She thinks her detachment was helpful. “If you are constantly projecting your own emotions into the session, they’re not going to be able to process what they’re feeling.” There are other benefits to Gagne’s sociopathic traits. “When I look at other women who are struggling with self-worth, shame, are struggling to make other people feel more comfortable by making themselves less comfortable, that seems awful, and it’s easy to say I’m better off that I don’t have to deal with that. But, conversely, women who have deep emotional ranges are able to connect much better than I can, to have those relationships that I don’t have.”
She does have good friendships, she says. “I am really fortunate to have friends who are both emotionally generous and nonjudgmental.” Can she be a good friend, empathic when she needs to be? She thinks so. “If I have a friend who is experiencing something I can’t directly relate to, I say: help me understand this. Other times, I just listen.” Has she offended her friends by saying or doing the wrong thing? “Of course,” she says with a laugh. “There are times where certain moments need sensitivity that I don’t always grasp, but they will let me know that reaction was not great and I can go, OK, I see that.”
As she wrote her book, Gagne started to understand herself more – and to feel empathy growing. “In writing about my experience as a child, I was able to empathise with other children who might be in the same position, and it was powerful – sort of, ‘Oh, this is what it feels like.’” It felt hopeful, she says. It was like being on the right path.
Sociopath: A Memoir by Patric Gagne (Pan Macmillan, £18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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