The Empathy Diaries

Description

“A beautiful book… an instant classic of the genre.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times • A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 by Kirkus • Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Autobiography & Memoir • Winner of the New England Society Book Award in Nonfiction

MIT psychologist and bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together, Sherry Turkle’s intimate memoir of love and work

For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of uncharted challenges. Turkle has spent a career composing an intimate ethnography of our digital world; now, marked by insight, humility, and compassion, we have her own.

In this vivid and poignant narrative, Turkle ties together her coming-of-age and her pathbreaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn,Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother’s secretive life. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father–and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival.

Turkle’s intellect and curiosity brought her to worlds on the threshold of change. She learned friendship at a Harvard-Radcliffe on the cusp of coeducation during the antiwar movement, she mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and she followed her ambition while fighting for her place as a woman and a humanist at MIT. There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections. The Empathy Diaries captures all this in rich detail–and offers a master class in finding meaning through a life’s work.“Sherry Turkle’s memoir, The Empathy Diaries, is a beautiful book. It has gravity and grace; it’s as inexorable as a fable; it drills down into the things that make a life; it works to make sense of existence on both its coded and transparent levels; it feels like an instant classic of the genre.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times

“The strong suit of The Empathy Diaries is the wonderful clarity with which Turkle guides us through her intellectual development . . . [a] compressed summary of Sherry Turkle’s intellectual progress toward the study of ‘how computers change not only what we do but who we are’ does not do justice to the pleasure a reader gets from following it in the pages of The Empathy Diaries, where it is recorded with a grace and lucidity that are inspiriting.” —Vivian Gornick, New York Times Book Review

“Turkle opens up the archives of her life, such that she becomes a subject to think with as much as an exemplary object about which to think. Whether uncovering the secrets of her family (and secrets are always multiple), examining the pain and joy of cross-class sociality and education at Radcliffe, or recounting evenings spent with Lacan, Turkle points her reader toward that which makes us human: vulnerability and, of course, the self-reflexive capacity for empathy. Along the way, Turkle offers an invaluable account, both personal and critical, of how ‘science and technology can make us forget what we know about life.’” —Hannah Zeavin, Public Books

“[A] transformational journey from an anxiety-infused childhood to an adulthood devoted to psychological insight and excellence in scholarship . . . Out of the ashes of the shame induced by her mother’s insistence on lies and pretense, Turkle learned the value of genuineness and empathy.” —Patricia Steckler, Drizzle Review

“If a book could carry a scent, The Empathy Diaries would waft Chanel No. 5….Turkle’s narrative is skillfully assembled, like pieces in a puzzle. She effectively blends the story of her growth in self-awareness with her professional realization that computers pose threats to the humans who have created them.”—Arthur Hoyle, The New York Journal of Books

“Lively and accessible . . . [Turkle] deftly draws the characters that populate her life and times–and what characters they are! With a disarming simplicity that (mostly) exonerates her from name-dropping, she introduces us to a roll call of some of the most significant intellectuals of the mid-20th century on either side of the Atlantic . . . an insightful autobiographical case-study in how a personal and intellectual life can be mutually formative and an astute cultural commentary on our times.” —Professor Lynn Frogget, Journal of Social Work Practice

“A beautifully wrought memoir about how emerging technology makes us think and feel [. . .] Anyone who studies, develops, or produces technology—and anyone who uses it—will gain crucial insights from this profound meditation on how technology is changing us. A masterful memoir by a pioneering researcher and incisive thinker.” —Kirkus (starred review)
 
“[R]evelatory and forthright . . . Turkle’s candor and transparency are totally in keeping with her personal and professional commitment to understanding human emotional motivation and our capacity for empathy, not only towards others but also towards ourselves.” —Booklist
 
“ [R]ichly detailed . . . Anyone who has felt the struggle to fit in will identify with [Turkle’s] story.” —Library Journal
 
“Since digital culture became part of our intimate lives, Sherry Turkle has helped us understand our complex, evolving dance with technology, using the power of data and analy- sis. Now, with raw and refreshing authenticity, she shares her personal journey, which serves as a powerful and poignant reminder that it is in our relationships with one another—not technology—that we find our most important source of meaning and healing.” —Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA, surgeon general of the United States, author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World

“In this beautiful, compulsively readable memoir, Sherry Turkle,  who has asked why we expect ‘more from technology and less from each other,’ excavates the eras of her continually surprising 20th century life. In her hands, empathy is the instrument of knowledge, illuminating the uses and pleasures of crucial human values now under threat. This is the story not only of a woman but of her humane and exhilarating mind.” —Honor Moore, poet and memoirist, author of Our Revolution, a Mother and Daughter at Midcentury

“Sherry’s life story is that of a woman who made her own way—both in the academic world and in the larger cultural conversation—by following her passions without fear and with tremendous integrity. In so doing, she has helped us all understand a vital aspect of our lives with much greater clarity. The Empathy Diaries is a case study in courage and where it can take us.” —Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global

 ”Sherry Turkle’s memoir is a page-turner, and I was so drawn in by its vivid narrative and exquisitely drawn characters that it took me a while to realize that this is also a strikingly original book about empathy. Her searing encounters with a stark lack of empathy in two of the most important men in her life—her scientifically driven father and renowned first husband—led her to the discovery that empathy is not simply an interesting research topic or ‘feminine’ virtue but, as it became for her, a ‘strategy for survival.’ The Empathy Diaries is a magnificent capstone to Sherry Turkle’s studies of the human costs of our romance with technology. Drawing on firsthand experience, she shows us how empathy is a lifesaving necessity in human relations and, potentially, a key to our survival as a species.” —Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice and most recently, Why Does Patriarchy Persist?

“In this brilliantly integrated memoir, Sherry Turkle traces her metamorphosis from the gifted child of a disturbed man to the preeminent ethnographer of digital culture. One part intellectual history, one part daddy dearest, one part portrait of the critic as a young woman, this is a one-of-a-kind page-turner. Bravo!” —Gish Jen, author of The Resisters

“I’ve long marveled at the remarkable and inspiring career of Sherry Turkle. Her path, so courageously interdisciplinary, has been strewn with dazzling insights. And now, in just the kind of brave and brilliant memoir one would expect from her, she gives us her personal story, explaining how, in a mind like hers, the deeply personal is transformed into ideas that can be shared by us all.” —Rebecca Goldstein, MacArthur Prize Fellow; National Humanities Medalist; author of Plato at the Googleplex

“This is a scintillating memoir. Turkle acts at once as storyteller, ethnographer, and psychologist of her own life—one stretching from a straitened Brooklyn Jewish girlhood shadowed by an unspeakable secret to a womanhood of academic accomplishment amidst the excitements of Radcliffe, Harvard, Chicago, Paris in the years after the upheaval of ’68 and MIT just as our computer world is born. Along the way she gives us a vivid account of ideas crucial to the last half-century of intellectual life, tracing their inner history with bracing clarity.” —Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love and Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors
 
“By respecting her own emotional, social, and intellectual history with careful—even loving—attention, Sherry Turkle shows what rescue from the crisis of technological disconnect looks like. Intimate, compassionate, and critical, her book instructs, edifies, and heals. A paradigmatic personal narrative, yet The Empathy Diaries is a tour de force of social science, saluting and protecting the precious intangibility that no machine can match—the quality that makes us human.” —James Carroll, author of The Truth at the Heart of the Lie
 
“Like a Harvard educated Nancy Drew, Sherry Turkle searches her past for clues to her true self and hits the mother lode in this fascinating, fearless memoir. Her struggle with the legacy of long-held family secrets as she forges her own unique path to authenticity and forgiveness is a story countless women will identify with. Reading The Empathy Diaries, I felt my mind—and my heart—expanding. Sherry Turkle is not only a great writer and teacher—she’s great company.” —Winnie Holzman, cowriter of the hit musical Wicked; creator of the television series My So-Called Life
 
“‘Use concrete events to think about large ideas. Use large ideas to think about concrete events.’ Sherry Turkle follows the advice of her professor, Samuel Beer, and The Empathy Diaries is the compelling result. The stages of Turkle’s narrative unfold so gracefully, in prose of such candor and clarity, that it’s easy to overlook how many tasks this memoir performs. The Empathy Diaries is about a childhood and a coming of age. It’s about a courtship and marriage. It’s also about the progress of Turkle’s engagement in the dynamic and overlapping fields in which this professor of social sciences, science, and technology is a crucial, authoritative, and, yes, empathetic voice. In every way, this is a book about an education. Fans of Turkle’s earlier work will certainly want to read The Empathy Diaries; but so too should everyone struggling in the cyber maze in which we find ourselves. A remarkable book.” —Rachel Hadas, PhD, Board of Governors Professor of English, Rutgers University–Newark
 
“I read it with delight. An honest, insightful, compelling, and sometimes painful account of the intellectual and emotional forces that shaped Turkle into a pioneer in the study of digital culture and how computers change the way we think about ourselves. Turkle’s is not only a personal story, but also a story of our digital age.” —Alan Lightman, Professor of the Practice of the Humanities, MIT; author of Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

“Sherry Turkle has been daring and original for a long time—bearing witness to the emergence of artificial intelligence but also writing forcefully, while surrounded by true believers at MIT, about its limitations. In The Empathy Diaries, she dares even further by investigating a tightly held family secret, affirming in the process the wisdom of the human heart. The Empathy Diaries tells a fascinating story—one that manages to be profound and entertaining at the same time.” —Susan Quinn, author of Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“Over the decades, Sherry Turkle has provided the most penetrating analyses of the relations between the human and the computational worlds. In a remarkably revealing memoir, Turkle explores the personal as well as scholarly sources of her understandings and, in the process, provides a brilliant panorama of our time.” —Howard Gardner, author of A Synthesizing Mind
Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A licensed clinical psychologist, she is the author of six books, including Alone Together and the New York Times best-seller Reclaiming Conversation, as well as the editor of three collections. A Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year, TED speaker, and featured media commentator, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Discussion Questions

My mother kept me from my father because she feared him. She had caught him performing psychological experiments on me. How does this early revelation color your reading The Empathy Diaries? It begins, after all, with a man who is the opposite of empathic.

I searched for my identity in a “memory closet,” where I found a photograph of my never-spoken-of-father with his face blacked out. It gave me a lifelong interest in searching for meaning in concrete objects. Do you have objects of childhood that were precious to you the way the objects of the memory closet were to me?

Living as a Bonowitz, I was secretive. Living as a Turkle, I was anxious. I fantasized (wished for?) invisibility as I longed for empathy. How do I handle these feelings and frustrations to find greater satisfactions?

Why does studying from “review books” make me feel fraudulent in school despite my hard work? What does this suggest about what kind of teacher I’m going to be, what kind of educational philosophy I will be drawn to?

Why is the notion of “decountrifying” so useful to me?

I describe several college courses that I still believe taught me how to think. What were the merits of these courses? I seem less interested in content than thinking about thinking.

When I learn my mother is dying, I face that on some level, I am not surprised. How do I try to think about the things we know but cannot say?

I was drawn to studying people on the margins of things. Do you think, in doing so, I was trying to think more deeply about myself?

I describe the contribution of mentors. What did they each provide? What does my experience suggest about the importance of face-to-face conversation in education?

Jacques Lacan wants to destroy the notion of a privileged “discourse of the master,” yet at his school, he is very much in the position of “thought master.” Many large organizations seem to this conflict. Do you come to this book with your own examples in mind?

The scene when my grandfather insists that my grandmother will not have home nurses cuts through my idealizations of him. Reading back, does this scene illuminate earlier episodes of Bonowitz life, including perhaps, my mother’s haste to marry Milton?

I try to capture the moment of infatuation even if one suspects one’s choice may not be wise. I tried many strategies before settling on my final choice of replicating the conversation, topic by topic. Discuss my choice. Compare it to other possible strategies.

When I take Seymour home to meet my grandfather, their encounter illustrates Seymour’s gifts as a teacher. He charms my grandfather with a juggling lesson. What elements of pedagogical strategy does Seymour bring together in that  lesson?

I describe my early days of teaching and asking my students to write “object papers,” papers that describe a fist object that was important in their lives: a spalding ball, a baseball mitt, a set of jacks, a deck of cards. Readers: Do you have an early object that influenced your later thinking and feeling?

I finally visit Charlie. I think it’s important that in the end, I ask Seymour to join me. Yet I am also shocked by a certain “similarity” between the two men. The comparison is unfair. Seymour is a world class scientist. Charlie, a crank. But my mind plays tricks with me and sees odd similarities. As a reader, could you empathize with my feelings?

  I have a showdown with Charlie when he tries to interfere with my MIT life. It ends our connection, after all the effort I put in to find him. Could I have handled things better?

I have a showdown with MIT, which ends up firing me before I get them to rehire me. I draw some practical lessons from my struggle. Would you choose others?

I worry about a flight from conversation as people would rather text than talk and a new kind of isolation as we turn to screens instead of each other… or turn to each other via screens. I write of “the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” On social media we can feel close but not vulnerable. Does this correspond to your experience of new media?

What are the benefits of seeking out experiences where you are a “stranger to your own voice?”

During the long hours of my grandmother’s dying, I begin to read the Brooklyn telephone book. I look up the Charles Zimmermans. There are pages of them. I study the entries carefully. It’s August 1975; I’m twent y­seven. For as long as I can re­ member, I’ve been both searching and not searching for Charles Zim­merman, my father, whom I haven’t seen since childhood.
Now I’m searching. In the back of one of my graduate school note­ books, I begin to copy down Charles Zimmerman addresses and telephone numbers, long lists of them. My mother is dead and my grandparents, with whom I stay when I’m in New York, have only the Brooklyn telephone book, no Manhattan directory. I know that in Cam­ bridge, Massachusetts, one of my Harvard professors has the Man­ hattan directory in his office. He once commented that everyone needs to have that directory at hand. At the time, this idea suggested a life of access and sophistication that thrilled me. Now, though, I feel a more practical need. When I get back to school, I ask his secretary if I may borrow his Manhattan book. She says no, but she lets me sit with it in his office, where I carefully copy out new Zimmerman can­ didates.

My grandmother dies in December. At LaGuardia Airport, flying back to Boston after her funeral, my plane is delayed. Standing next to a pay phone, I study the Queens directory and copy down the in­ formation for all its Charles Zimmermans. It never occurs to me that my father might live in the Bronx or have moved out of New York City altogether.

Nearly three years later, at a picnic table in Ipswich, Massachu­ setts, I tell my aunt Mildred, my mother’s sister, that I want to find Charlie, as he was known on the rare occasions when my family spoke of him. Can she help me?

Both  during  my  mother’s  life  and  long  afterword,  Mildred,  my grandparents, and I had respected my mother’s wish to keep secret what she considered the great shame of her early divorce. 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.

Mildred’s struggle over what to say is visible, painful to watch. She promised my mother, before she died, to keep me away from my fa­ ther. Finally, Mildred comes to a decision. “If you are going to do it, if you are decided, I should help you,” she says. “Charlie once worked as a teacher. Many years after your mother’s divorce, I met someone who said that he worked as a teacher.” With that, Mildred stares down at her feet. I feel my aunt’s love. She has given me what she can. I met with a private investigator, a former police detective. I no longer remember his name, just his thin black hair and shiny gray suit. In the spring of 1979, I visited his small, bare office on the West Side, furnished with only a well­used lamp, a coat tree, and a steel desk. Sitting across from me, he traced out, on a clean sheet of paper, the meager details I knew about my father: his name; that he and my mother were divorced in Florida in the early 1950s; that he might be named in my adoption proceedings beginning in the late 1950s; and the precious detail added by my aunt: he had worked as a teacher in the New York City public school system.

After  Thanksgiving,  the  detective  called.  He’d  found  a  Charles Zimmerman who once taught school in Queens, he said. This former teacher is my father’s age. There’s also a record of a Zimmerman di­ vorce in Branford, Florida, in 1951. The man’s birth date matches that of the teacher in Queens. I remember that as we spoke, I could only take shallow breaths. I was crossing a line. My mother had not wanted me to do this. Perhaps she’d had her reasons.

I wrote a letter. My husband, Seymour Papert, helped me. We rewrote it many times. The final version left Charlie a lot of room to turn me down.
Dear Mr. Zimmerman, 
 I am Sherry Turkle, the daughter of Harriet Bonowitz and Charles Zimmerman, born on June 18, 1948. I was adopted by Milton Turkle, my mother’s second husband, and thus carry his name. I have reason to believe that you are my father. I have not been in contact with my father for many years. If you are my father, I would like to meet with you and renew our acquaintance. Please be in touch in whatever way you find most comfortable. Thank you.
 
Sincerely,
Sherry Turkle 
44 Tappan Street, Brookline, Massachusetts 617-267-xxxx 
 
Some days later the phone rang. Seymour answered. He reached for me, slung his arm around my shoulder. He kissed me on the fore­ head as he passed me the phone. “Hello, is this Sherry Turkle?” The same voice asked if I had recently written to a Charles Zimmerman in Queens.

“Yes,” I say.

“This is your father.”
I haven’t spoken to Charlie in almost nineteen years. I saw him intermittently as a child, and then after Milton Turkle adopted me, I never heard from him again. Now he wants to see me. I grab a calendar. He gives me an address. We set a date for the following December weekend, just before Christmas.

Charlie answered the door. He looked like me. That’s what I no­ ticed first. The eyes. The mouth. I have his ears. His first words to me, right there at the door: “Did you find me through the New York Times?”

When I said, “No, I hired a detective,” he seemed disappointed. For a moment I imagined, almost giddy, that he’d been advertising for a lost daughter.

My father turned out to be a rogue scientist. Now a retired high school teacher, for decades he had worked out of his home and had written a book in which he claimed to disprove Einstein’s theory of relativity. Relentlessly, he then wrote to famous scientists, trying to get them to take his work seriously. He also advertised his self­published Einstein book in the back pages of the New York Times Book Review: “E=mc² is not correct. Queens high school teacher disproves Einstein. For more information write Charles Zimmerman.” He provided a post office box number. This is the advertisement my father thought had led me to him. His Einstein disproof is displayed on a table in the living room. It is small and dark and blue.

After such a long time of knowing nothing about him, it was good to find out that Charlie was alive, healthy, and not homeless. The apartment where we met reminded me pleasantly of my grandparents’ Brooklyn home. Here as there, an upholstered sofa and chairs were covered in plastic. There was a dining room set in a wood that looked so shiny that it could not possibly be real. It was some kind of space­ age cherry.

Charlie explained that this was the home of his “woman friend,” Lila. She’d been standing shyly behind him ever since he greeted me at the door, and now he introduced me. Lila is petite and pretty. I think of my mother. Tall and imposing, feminine and sociable. Char­ lie likes the company of women. Women like Charlie’s company. Lila encouraged us to sit down at the table, where food was already spread out. She said how happy she is that this day has come, that she has encouraged it often.

For lunch, Charlie told me that I will have the traditional: bagels, lox, cream cheese. Babka. He will have a kale shake. I knew he was a vegetarian because it was the first thing he mentioned after showing me his New York Times advertisement. A childhood memory came back to me—drinking a cantaloupe malted with him in Prospect Park.

As a child, among the few things I had heard about Charlie was that he was a chemist and that he had given up his right to be in con­ tact with me in exchange for being released from any obligation to pay child support. I think my mother let slip the chemist detail be­ cause it was something she could be proud of. I imagined her dream­ ing that a chemist husband would bring new status. She would visit the world of her parents and sister from a place of nicer things, she would be generous with them, her home could be their gathering place.

At our meeting, Charlie said that he had done graduate work in chemistry and also confirmed the story I’d been told about child sup­ port. My mother had wanted to erase her life with him, he said. He didn’t suit her, and her lawyer thought that the easiest way to get rid of him was to ask for what he couldn’t provide: money. You shouldn’t demand money from a father in exchange for letting him see his daughter, he said.

For a moment, I saw Charlie’s point of view. From there, I could imagine that he had actually been interested in me.

Then, over lunch, I began to take the fuller measure of my father. He couldn’t connect over a feeling or even a food. I told him I had missed knowing him. I had longed for news from him—on my birth­ days I had waited at the mailbox. He didn’t say he had missed me. It was “how your mother wanted it,” he said. At the table, he drank green juice but did not offer it to anyone else. Then he took small portions from several plates of pale cooked vegetables, none of these offered to the table either. I recognized only one: daikon. I’d seen it in Japanese restaurants.
As we ate—Lila and I, bagels and smoked salmon, Charlie, his eclectic array—I began to ask some questions and was relieved that he was willing to answer them. All these years, I wondered, had he re­ ceived any news of me? Yes, a little. He had a friend who had worked with my mother when she was a substitute teacher at Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. Through this connection, Charlie knew I had done very well in school. He walked over to a manila folder and pro­ duced a June 1965 clipping from a Brooklyn newspaper. It reported that I’d won a scholarship to Radcliffe, and it was accompanied by a photograph. There I am in my official senior year portrait, wearing a black Grecian­style drape and staring into the middle distance some­ what dreamily.

I asked Charlie: “Did you think of writing me?”

“No,” he said. “I thought your mother wouldn’t have liked that.”

At this, I struggled to hold back tears. I told myself that saving  the clipping was how he was able to communicate his feelings of con­ nection. But I had hoped for so much more. Then he told me that he knew that my mother died while I was in college. I don’t remember him offering condolences or saying anything about her being gone. His face, I recall, was still.

Charlie said he lost track of me after Radcliffe. But now he’s glad to know that I am a professor at MIT. Because, he said, he and I had been scientists together. We had done “experiments from the start.”

Before I could ask what he meant, Charlie was talking about his scientific passions. Some, he said, were triggered by my birth. How does language begin? Is it innate? Could he make a groundbreaking contribution to child development? Was he perhaps the next Skinner? I felt a shiver, fearing what might be ahead, but Charlie seemed not to notice.

When I was a baby, Charlie explained, whenever my mother was not around, he used me as an experimental subject. I felt sick and was afraid to ask for details. I remember thinking that I must force myself. And so I did. “What experiments?” I remember the moment when his story became too painful and  I floated away from it, apart from the Sherry in the chair with the coffee cup on the table in front of her. I sat opposite my father and I could hardly breathe.
 
Finally I understood why my mother left him. Why Charlie never dared a holiday card or birthday call. Later, when I told Mil­ dred about my visit with Charlie, I didn’t mention the experiments. I reassured my aunt that Charlie had done me no harm during our visit. But I asked her what she remembered about my mother’s brief first marriage. She confided that very soon after the wedding, my mother was unhappy. Charlie was withdrawn and her new mother­in­law was intrusive and critical. Still, Mildred said, my mother chose her trou­ bles with Charlie over the shame of a separation. No one in my family was divorced. Or knew anyone who had been divorced.

But then, one Saturday afternoon in late spring 1949, my mother called and asked Mildred to pick us up. We were living with Charlie in Bayside, Queens, and my mother wanted to leave. She named an inter­ section close to our home, near some shops. Mildred said that she and my grandmother drove right out and found us waiting on the curb, my mother holding me in her arms, our hastily packed clothes in shopping bags at her feet. The drive to my grandparents’ apartment in Brooklyn was silent; no one asked any questions. Once home, my grandfather was happy to have us under his protection. When Charlie called after us, my grandfather got on the phone. My mother, he said, was getting a divorce.

As Charlie told me that afternoon: “That was the end of that.”

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.8000 × 5.5300 × 8.2400 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780525560111
ISBN-10	0525560114
Author	Sherry Turkle
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BIO022000, SOC052000
Subjects	autobiography books, empathy, biographies, memoirs, books for women, autobiographies, SOC052000, political books, biographies of famous people, jewish books, women in history, sociology books, memoir books, biographies and memoirs, mom books, mom gifts, inspirational books for women, historical biographies, biographies of women, about women, Memoir, history, women, politics, feminism, entertainment, BIO022000, divorce, biography, celebrity, parenting, comedy, motherhood, Sociology, gifts for mom, books for mom, jewish, history books, autobiography