Sociopath

Patric Gagne worked out that she unsettled people before she was old enough for kindergarten. The emotions other children seemed to run on, fear and guilt and empathy, did not turn up in her, and their absence built into a physical pressure she learned she could discharge by doing something she was not meant to: taking things, breaking in, driving where she should not be.

For years she had no name for it. When she found one, sociopathy, the label came with a diagnosis of untreatable and a public image assembled largely from film villains. Gagne's memoir tracks what she did with that: a relationship with a man who knew, a decision to study the thing she had, and a PhD in clinical psychology whose dissertation examined the link between sociopathy and anxiety.

She writes as someone who was told there was nothing to be done for her and did not accept it. The book argues that antisocial personality disorder is a condition on a spectrum, largely unstudied because the people who have it are written off before anyone asks, and that a person can carry it and still build a life with other people in it.