Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Le nom du Pere -- 1948-1968. Summer palace/winter palace ; The memory closet ; An unsentimental education ; Depaysement ; Twelfth night ; Taxis ; Mourning -- 1968-1975. Newspapers and vinegar ; Things for thinking ; Great books ; The Lacanian village ; Chere-cheur ; The perfect shortcake ; Knots -- 1976-1985. The xerox room ; Building 20 ; The marriage of true minds ; Coming apart ; The last experiment ; The assault on empathy -- Epilogue: People are not objects.

"MIT psychologist and bestselling author of RECLAIMING CONVERSATION and ALONE TOGETHER, Sherry Turkle's intimate memoir of love and work In this vivid and poignant narrative, Sherry Turkle ties together her coming-of-age story and her groundbreaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in post-war Brooklyn in a house filled with mysteries, Turkle searched for clues. She mastered the codes that governed her secretive mother's world. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father. And never to use his name, her name. Empathy was her strategy for survival. Turkle's intellect and curiosity propelled her to the thresholds of defining cultural moments that became life-lessons: she practiced friendship at Harvard/Radcliffe at the cusp of co-education during the antiwar movement, mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and faced the extent of her ambition while fighting for her place in the academy as a woman 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 masterclass in finding meaning through life's work."--