Empathy [Paperback]

Sarah Schulman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1993

The award-winning author of After Delores writes a novel that probes the questions of sexual identity, self-renewal, and transformation. An office temp's journey of self-discovery culminates when she meets another woman whose essential BOMC Selection.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lesbian writer Schulman follows her well-received After Delores and People in Trouble with this insightful allegory, which explores the feminine and masculine qualities said to coexist within every personality. The novel is prefaced by a troubling quote from Freud, which alleges that lesbianism results from a woman's frustrated Elektra complex and desire to punish her father. This theory is challenged by protagonist Anna O (meant to suggest a famous Freud patient), a lesbian secure in her attraction to women yet struggling with male sexism, her family's homophobia and her feelings that she is unlovable. Anna consults "street-corner psychiatrist" Doc, who roams New York's Lower East Side and charges patients $10 an hour for his listening skills. Representing the female and male halves of a complete person, Anna and Doc discover that together they can confront conventional mores, their own guilt and a woman, symbolically clad in white leather, who broke their hearts. In a resolution that better serves the book's allegorical aims than its dramatic development, Anna and Doc are composites that masquerade as characters. In a plain-spoken, often funny narrative, Schulman makes provocative statements about gender roles, sexual orientation, AIDS, homelessness, drugs and the therapeutic value of an attentive ear. Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Anna, the main character in Schulman's ( People in Trouble , LJ 1/90) new novel, tries to make some sense of her crazy, mixed-up life with the help of Doc, her therapist and alter ego. She wants to resolve the anger and resentment she feels toward her intolerant family so that she can accept herself. This work might better have been called Guilt , since her characters more often act out of guilt and embarrassment than any other feeling. Anna feels guilt for not helping the poor and homeless and for not being normal or feminine enough. She tells Doc that the most important thing to remember about families of lesbians is that "you just can't outwit them. . . . No matter how normal you try to be, you'll never be normal." The novel relies on characters who engage in dream sequences to make their points. Not very much plot action unfolds, but, while the dialog is at times offbeat and disjointed, it is always witty and irreverent. When the characters are unmasked at the end, readers will be surprised at the deftness with which this story is told.
- Lisa Nussbaum, formerly with Cambria Cty. P.L., Johnstown, Pa.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Plume (October 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452270499
• ISBN-13: 978-0452270497
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,404,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sarah Schulman is the author of fifteen books, including nine novels. Forthcoming is the hard cover edition of a new nonfiction book THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND: WItness to a Lost Imagination by University of California Press, to be followed in Spring, 2012 by the paperback of TIES THAT BIND: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences Then is Fall 2012, Duke University Press will publish ISRAEL/PALESTINE AND THE QUEER INTERNATIONAL. Most recently the paperback edition of her novel THE MERE FUTURE was published by Arsenal Pulp.Previous novels are THE CHILD, SHIMMER, EMPATHY, RAT BOHEMIA, PEOPLE IN TROUBLE, AFTER DELORE, GIRLS VISIONS AND EVERYTHING and THE SOPHIE HOROWITZ STORY. Her nonfiction titles are TIES THAT BIND: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, STAGESTRUCK:Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America, and MY AMERICAN HISTORY: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years. A working playwright, her productions include: CARSON McCULLERS (published by Playscripts Ink), MANIC FLIGHT REACTION and the theatrical adaptation of Isaac Singer's ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY. As a screenwriter, her films include THE OWLS (co-written with director Cheryl Dunye)- Berlin Film Festival 2010, MOMMY IS COMING (co-written with director Cheryl Dunye)- Berlin Film Festival selection 2011, and she is co-producer with Jim Hubbard of his feature documentary UNITED IN ANGER: A History of ACT UP, which will premiere in Jan/Feb 2012.. SOPHIE, a film based on her 1984 novel, THE SOPHIE HOROWITZ STORY is being written and director by Claude Mangold and is currently in pre-production. As a journalist, her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Interview. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwrighting, a Fullbright in Judaic Studies, two American Library Association Book Awards, and is the 2009 recipient of the Kessler Prize for sustained contribution to LGBT studies. Sarah is Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, College of State Island, a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. She is on the advisory board of the Center for Human Rights and Social Movements at Harvard's Kennedy School. She is the US coordinator of the first LGBT Delegation to Palestine. She lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It walks so high... then falls off a cliff., July 2, 2003

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Empathy: 2 (Paperback)

Sara Schulman, Empathy (Dutton, 1992)

Until roughly twenty minutes before writing this review, I was getting ready to say Empathy was going to be a definite for my best twenty-five reads of 2003 list. Then I read the last three chapters.

The first twenty-seven are brilliant. The story's two main characters are Anna O., a lesbian attempting to get over an old relationship and find someone new, and Doc, a post-Freudian therapist who finds prospective clients by handing out business cards on the street and will never keep a client for more than three sessions. Eventually, their two stories intertwine as Anna, finding one of Doc's business cards, makes an appointment with him. The two of them then proceed to take on relationships of all sorts, Jewish funerals, AIDS, the homeless, and a rainbow of other topics with a wicked wit. Doc obsesses over an old girlfriend as well, and feels an almost supernatural connection with Anna. When one of the main questions in a book is "will Doc end up having a fourth session with Anna?", it's impossible to write a review in a way that makes it sound as important as it actually is, but Anna, Doc, and the supporting cast of characters (Anna's family, Doc's patients and mentor, Anna's old girlfriend's mother, Doc's old girlfriend) are so well-drawn and engaging that it's well-night impossible not to be drawn in to the point where you sit up at night thinking about such things.

Then Schulman hits you with the kicker, the novel's climax, and though it's nothing we haven't seen before (telling you where would be the ultimate plot spoiler, however), it's a sucker punch delivered with such aplomb that it demands a "thank you, ma'am, may I have another." I had figured I knew where the book was going, had it mapped out in my head (and it was a brilliant ending, too), then Schulman flipped all my expectations on their heads and delivered what may have been the only climax that was actually better than what I thought it would be.

Then we get to Chapter Twenty-Seven, and everything goes to hell in a handbasket. We spend two chapters involved in political polemic that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the novel, and while they are two brief chapters, their very existence in the book poisons the whole thing. Schulman attempts to wrap things up in the last chapter by going back to the original topic of life-after-Doc Anna, but by then it's too late. The rhythm, the style, the all-around beauty of the book has been dashed against a curb on a dark, rainy street.

My advice? By all means, read this novel. Up to chapter twenty-six. Then skip ahead to chapter thirty. You will still find an ending that is an anticlimax, to say the least, but you will at least be spared pointless political diatribe along the way. ** ½

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I 've re-read it at least 8 times over the years., March 17, 2002

By 

John Labella (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Empathy: 2 (Paperback)

Aside from being one of the funniest books I've ever read, it has a special quality: Certain paragraphs will spring out at me and I'll think: "I've always wanted the words to describe that kind of feeling or circumstance, and there on the page are the perfect words."

I tend to devalue words as having little effect on the world, but reading Empathy reminds me that good writers can keep people alive when their sense of reality is questioned so brutally by the mainstream world. This book feels like my bible more than any thing else. And it has many funny moments in it. Oh . . . there were also paragraphs where I didn't have a clue what she was talking about.... Still, all in all, my favorite book of all this decade.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Funny, witty, real, April 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Empathy (Paperback)

Maybe one of the most intricate and elaborate work about identity I have ever read. Sarah Schulman's writing makes us dive into a historical pool of events and questions each and every one of us have experienced in our own special moments.