The selfishness of others An essay on the fear of narcissism

IN THE PARIS REVIEW and n+1, Kristin Dombek has written about abortion, addiction, losing her religion and group sex. I suppose you'd call these pieces "personal essays." This is a category of writing sagging with the baggage of bad associations: the preening college-admissions essay; the flimsy dear-diary entries on xojane.com. But Dombek dignifies the genre. Her essays are personal in the way of Montaigne or Virginia Woolf: bold, humane and more imaginative than navel-gazing. Dombek's "The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism" is a treatise that comes in at just under 140 pages of text, dense with information but light on its feet. In seven chapters, Dombek turns over a topic that is big and slippery, trendy and hoary, thorny and funny: the charge of narcissism, as it appears in literature (Ovid, Freud) and the Literature (Alice Miller, Donald Winnicott, Otto Kernberg); on reality television (MTV's "My Super Sweet 16") and the internet (soupy self-help sites); and within the life of the author, though here she is careful, perhaps exceedingly so. "I'm an essayist; I write the word I all day long, and I'm nervous when I do," she writes near the beginning. "More than anything, I don't want you to think me self-absorbed." You won't. Dombek's take on narcissists is that it takes one to know one. That said, she is sufficiently self-aware to direct her attention outward for the bulk of this slim and disciplined book. When, toward the end, she offers a little of her own experience, she does it in the second or third person with a few choice anecdotes - one that involves a herd of wild horses, another that takes place in the back seat of a late-'90s Pontiac Bonneville. These stories really land. I found myself thinking of this book as a kind of corollary to Larissa MacFarquhar's "Strangers Drowning," which shows how selflessness can turn destructive when empathy goes into overdrive. Dombek looks at the flip side: Is it possible to splash around in narcissism's shallow pool in a joyful, generous way? The answer is yes. "Narcissists are the most popular kids at school," Dombek tells us in the first chapter, aptly titled "The Cold," for the chill you feel when someone cool starts ignoring you. As adults, narcissists "are not all really rock stars or movie stars, but they seem like they are." The second chapter, "The Epidemic," is more clinical, citing the DSM's Diagnostic Criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder - things like "Requires excessive admiration" and "Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes." If these sound vague, subjective or unmeasurable, it's because they are, and while Dombek's straight-as-a-razor tone can sometimes make it difficult to decide whether she is credulous or skeptical, her understatement allows the reader to draw her own conclusions. The other morning, I was catcalled by a tanned and tattooed dude hanging out next to Penn Station. "You're pretty," he said, and (requiring excessive admiration) I smiled at him. "For your age," he added. Who's the cool kid now? Dombek is excellent on the language of pop psychology and how it flatters those everyday narcissists: people in the throes of heartbreak. "Rather than just getting upset because your boyfriend is not talking to you as much as he used to, you'll recognize that he is 'doing a discard,"' she writes, sampling the paranoid style of "that sizable portion of the self-help internet we might call, awkwardly, the narcisphere." On sites like narcissism-answers .com and narcissismaddictionsabuse.com, "the victims of narcissists learn to hone their 'narcdar' for diagnosing 'ncism' and their 'narc'; call themselves ?narcissistic supply'; help one another watch out for narc strategies such as 'love bombing,' ?mirroring,' 'dosing,' 'silent treatment,' 'word salad,' 'triangulation' and 'hoovering'; and find comfort when they experience a D&D (devalue and discard) or an IDD (idealize, devalue, discard). They Kristin Dombek learn there are two kinds of 'no contact': NC (no contact) and NCEA (no contact ever again)." Word salad, indeed. Many a spurned one (ahem) has gob bled this stuff up, and it is to Dombek's credit that she doesn't disavow an embarrassing search history. Instead she is curious about the solace it seems to offer at the time: "You'll find your own life described with uncanny accuracy by perfect strangers who seem to know you, and comments sections that are choruses of grateful recognition." Dombek's armchair psychologizing is more playful than diagnostic - she's the type of therapist to ask thoughtful, open-ended questions that leave you scratching your head at the end of a session and prod you toward an "aha" moment. She discerns the neediness that throbs through the person who believes himself to be the lover-victim of a narcissist: basically a masochist who thinks he's an angel. It's easier to call yourself an empath than a bitter, jilted ex-lover, a pathetic loser or a self-saboteur. From the guy who's just not that into you to a psychopathic villain, narcissists exist on a spectrum. The narcissist is anyone and everyone - the bad boyfriend or bad girlfriend, the bad analysand ("From the perspective of Freud's emerging 'science,' if they didn't need therapy, their self-sufficiency must be a case of arrested development"), the millennial in the middle, probably no more self-involved than any other generation - which makes him a bit of a straw man. Dombek questions the measurements of social psychology, reliant as they are on self-reported emotions and states of mind. How well can we know ourselves, and how do we stack up against others? Anders Breivik, in prison for murdering 77 people, "complains of his conditions: His PlayStation does not have the games he likes, his room lacks a view, and all he wants to do is write apocalyptic memoirs and manifestoes about how women and Muslims are growing in power and must be overcome, but the rubber pen he's been given cramps his hand." By underscoring the humdrum nature of his complaints, both petty and familiar, Dombek suggests we have our own blind spots and may have more in common with Breivik than we care to admit. "When macaques are shown pictures of other monkeys whose faces are like theirs," Dombek writes, "and then monkeys whose faces are less and less like theirs, they hit, somewhere along the way, what neuroscientists call the 'uncanny valley' and freak out." This put me in mind of a Snapchat feature: a radical, random flash of plastic surgery that merges the faces of two people sharing the same frame. We might like or love the friend with whom we pose, but we recoil at this rendering that makes our faces different and similar at the same time. Dombek's book inhabits the zone of face-swap with equanimity. It's a much more interesting place than static, passive victimhood, "where all the narcissistic romance websites invite you to be: in the center of the world, stuck in time, assessing the moral status of others, until love is gone." In "How to Quit," an essay published in n+1 a few years ago, Dombek owned up to being what someone less imaginative than she might term an enabler. "Drunks, drug addicts, sex addicts, compulsive gamblers and/or people on or recovering from deep, life-threatening benders: These are the only people who really hold my interest, which means that I usually am friends with ... and/ or love people with a dead parent or two, bipolar or otherwise depressed people, musicians, writers and/or pathological liars," she writes. "Even so, I never know when I meet them. They always just seem to me like the best people in the world." Dombek has been burned by more than one narcissist, it would seem, but she's no longer a moth to the flame. "The Selfishness of Others" rejects the rush and sweep of feeling for something measured and resilient. She's less besotted with the ones who got away, and more inclined to keep moving: "I drop a cigarette into a snowbank and it bores a hot hole into the snow and disappears. It's behind me, and in front of someone else." GEMMA SIEFF is an editor at Bookforum.