The Empathy Diaries

A Memoir

By: Sherry Turkle

Narrated by: Jill Larson

“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.

Privacy with Empathy

This book’s paramount message is presented with heartfelt stories: growing up in Brooklyn, center of a loving family; attaining tenure at MIT; addressing lack of solitude as technology surrounds us. Read with the right touch of emotion.

very revealing portrait

This memoir illuminates the life of a supremely talented professional woman in the early years of women's liberation. Thanks to her diaries and an excellent memory, she describes her childhood in fascinating detail. Whether she mentions it or not, many of those experiences relate directly to her interests and accomplishments and romances as an adult. Very sensitively narrated.

Beautiful and brilliant

We all feel the repercussions of the place and prominence of technology in our lives and will be better people for seriously considering the questions raised throughout this book. I only wish I had equal insight into my own story. Lovely narration as well.

Personal and profound exploration of where we’ve been and where we’re going

Sherry Turkle us on an exploration of her personal life that has implications for where we’re going in our

not decided

The shift between times and stories.. I understand wanting to keep some parts private however I am underwhelmed. I still enjoyed listening to the book and I do not regret it only wished I could stop sherry on some parts and ask for more information or just for a closure on some parts. I'm glad I listened to it.