David Desmond Loves to Watch Egos in Motion

The eponymous star of David Desmond‘s first novel, The Misadventures of Oliver Booth: Life in the Lap of Luxury, is not especially likable at first encounter. In fact, he’s a colossal jerk. Desmond says he drew upon several people he encountered in Palm Beach and Paris, blending their traits into one massively narcissistic figure and then turning him loose on high society. In this essay, he explains how his pre-literary background helped hone his observational skills. (New Yorkers will have a chance to meet Desmond on October 16, when he’ll be reading at the Park Avenue Borders.)

I was a clinical psychologist in a previous life, although not in the Shirley MacLaine sense. I’m frequently asked how I decided to make a transition into a life as a novelist. I’ve never really thought of it as a career change, though, more as an effort to attack the same problem from a slightly different angle.

I discovered the profession of clinical psychology in my early teenage years. I didn’t really understand what that occupation entailed, but I knew that it involved the study and treatment of dysfunctional human behavior. I was fascinated by other people and, perhaps at too young an age, I had begun reading the existentialists, who with their nihilism provided very little in the way of constructive advice about the human condition. In my doctoral training, I studied a wide range of theories of personality, but I connected best with ego psychology and the insights that it provided into character disorders such as pathological narcissism and their infantile roots. For many years, it was common for people that I would meet at cocktail parties to ask, “Are you analyzing me right now?” I would jokingly reply, “No, I’m finished,’ but in fact that question was usually quite reasonable because there’s nothing more interesting than meeting new people, that is, if one takes the time to get to know them.

Every person has a story to tell. Although the well-adjusted among us can tell their own stories with some degree of insight, those who are more dysfunctional keep psychologist/writers such as myself in business.

It’s not only the professional psychologist who is interested in human behavior. In reality, we all function as amateur psychologists in virtually every interaction in which we become involved because it can only be through an informed understanding of the motivations of other people that we can successfully navigate our everyday lives. The exceptions, of course, are the survivalists who live in log cabins hidden in the backwoods of Idaho and those people who are so deeply narcissistic that the rest of us exist simply to reflect their imagined merits. It’s quite remarkable that the deeply narcissistic can often obtain dramatic successes in their chosen profession, be it investment banking, acting, or politics, but their fatal flaws usually become readily apparent in other settings when they’re among those who have no obligation or incentive to put up with them.

The bottom line is that I didn’t really choose to become clinical psychologist or a writer: Those professions chose me, because I’ve always been interested in human behavior and its underpinnings. I currently divide my time between Palm Beach and Paris, both playgrounds of the rich and dysfunctional, and those locales provide me with seemingly endless material for my writing. I’ve already completed the sequel to The Misadventures of Oliver Booth: Life in the Lap of Luxury, which follows Oliver from Palm Beach to New York as he becomes involved in the world of high-end real estate, and I’m toying with the idea of throwing him into the seamy world of cosmetic surgery in the third book in the series. Perhaps I’m going to need to attend a few more Palm Beach galas this social season before I decide what Oliver’s future will hold.

28 September 2008 | guest authors |