Those precocious motherfuckers have an unnatural ability to understand way too well the motivations and emotions of the adults around them.
Hey! I think I was a precocious motherfucker. Hell, I think I was smarter and more observant of people's emotions and cadances then than I am now. I figured out stuff on my own and hit the nail on the head just from tid bits of conversations and the way a person (well my dad, really) reacted to certain mentions of certain people. I honestly think I've lost that some as I've gotten older. I'm just saying...
The book does sound interesting...why am I drawn to stories told by sociopaths?? :/
I'm not going to tell you you're wrong about your own experiences, but I find it difficult to believe any child is capable of truly understanding adult motivations and emotions by virtue of their lack of emotional development. This isn't to say you weren't in tune with the adults around you; that is a common strategy of children of alcoholism. We had to be in tune because that's how we protected ourselves. But we never understood why we were doing the things we were until we grew up and were able to view our pasts from an adult perspective. Just my thoughts.
I think we like sociopathic narrators because we all kind of wish at some point that we could be sociopaths and not give a shit about whether or not we are hurting people and just do whatever makes us feel good. Flavia isn't really a sociopath, though, she just has the potential to become one due to the circumstances of her upbringing.
Have you read the Mallory books by Carol O'Connell? Mallory is a truly engaging sociopathic heroine.
Hmmm...I don't know, though I get what you are saying and I even partly agree, but I just feel like when I think about certain things from my childhood, I'm not thinking oh that makes sense now, but why did that make sense to me then. How could I have gotten that? Was there something that happened to me that I've blocked out that made me more perseptive to it. *Shrugs* I mean I could be remembering wrong....memory is certainly fallable and subject to interperatation...IDK
And no I havn't read those. Maybe I'll have to check them out. That's a good point though as to why we read them.
I will hmmmm as well, because I find memory to be a very mercurial trickster. I believe things "make sense" to us as kids because whatever our upbringing is, we consider it "normal." So, it all made sense, in a way, because that's just the way it was. Now, you look back and think, "Wow, that was truly fucked up, or strange, or not great, or whatever, how did I ever understand all that?" Or something similar.
Adlerian therapists contend that the point of recalling early memories is not to find out what happened, but to see what interpretation we've put on past events. What actually affects us from our childhoods isn't what happened, but how we've filtered what happened as an adult. There's more to it than that, but I'm suddenly feeling pedagogical, and not in a good way, so I'll stop.
Anyway. I highly recommend the Mallory books. It's a series of mysteries and part of the appeal is, can Kathy Mallory actually grow a soul, so to speak? Or is she a lost cause - great cop, but terrible friend? I enjoy them a lot.
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Hey! I think I was a precocious motherfucker. Hell, I think I was smarter and more observant of people's emotions and cadances then than I am now. I figured out stuff on my own and hit the nail on the head just from tid bits of conversations and the way a person (well my dad, really) reacted to certain mentions of certain people. I honestly think I've lost that some as I've gotten older. I'm just saying...
The book does sound interesting...why am I drawn to stories told by sociopaths?? :/
Reply
I think we like sociopathic narrators because we all kind of wish at some point that we could be sociopaths and not give a shit about whether or not we are hurting people and just do whatever makes us feel good. Flavia isn't really a sociopath, though, she just has the potential to become one due to the circumstances of her upbringing.
Have you read the Mallory books by Carol O'Connell? Mallory is a truly engaging sociopathic heroine.
Reply
And no I havn't read those. Maybe I'll have to check them out. That's a good point though as to why we read them.
Reply
Adlerian therapists contend that the point of recalling early memories is not to find out what happened, but to see what interpretation we've put on past events. What actually affects us from our childhoods isn't what happened, but how we've filtered what happened as an adult. There's more to it than that, but I'm suddenly feeling pedagogical, and not in a good way, so I'll stop.
Anyway. I highly recommend the Mallory books. It's a series of mysteries and part of the appeal is, can Kathy Mallory actually grow a soul, so to speak? Or is she a lost cause - great cop, but terrible friend? I enjoy them a lot.
Reply
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