The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

“We never spoke of my biological father. More than this, from the time I was five and my mother remarried—this was to Milton Turkle—my family lived under a regime of pretend. The rules were that although my legal name was Sherry Zimmerman, I had to say that my name was Sherry Turkle.”

Turkle’s phrasing—“regime of pretend”—emphasizes the authoritarian parenting style of her mother. Turkle examines the impact of her mother’s lies on her identity and her tolerance as an adult for lies and liars. In the process of writing her memoir, Turkle finds empathy for her mother. She realizes that her secrecy and rules were motivated by protection.

“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.