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New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar is the author of Strangers Drowning, a book about extreme do-gooders, the psychological origins of grand ethical commitments, and the existential contests embedded in a life of trying to do the right thing. MacFarquhar is one of the incredible finalists for NYPL’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Each year the award is given to journalists whose books have brought clarity and public attention to important issues, events, or policies. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Larissa MacFarquhar.

MacFarquhar traced her decision to write Strangers Drowning back to a sense that, oddly, altruists got a bad rap. She described a constellation of associated traits ascribed to do-gooders:

"There's two contradictory clichés that exist simultaneously about very morally driven people. One is that they are boring, that they are kind of simple and that goodness is kind of simple and boring, whereas evil is complex and fascinating. I felt that that was deeply wrong, and I wondered why there weren't more good characters in fiction, and I thought this one of the reasons... There's something pushing against goodness in our culture, and I wanted to figure out what that was because I think that's another one of the reasons that most of us don't do more, and it's this sense that there's something irritating. There's something perverse. There's something boring, all kinds of contradictory bad things about good people."

Where does the impulse for altruism come from? MacFarquhar was particularly interested in one theory about the psychological roots beginning in dysfunctional households:

"There's this theory of the parentified child. The idea is that a child who grows up with one parent who is not functioning as a parent either because he or she is an alcoholic, perhaps, or a drug addict or is severely mentally ill or for some other reason is not working out as a parent, and obviously in many cases this just messes the kid up. But in some cases, the child will react by desperately trying to fix her family. Maybe she will try to become the perfect student. Maybe she will take care of the parent, take care of her younger siblings, learn how to cook, learn how to clean the house, try to fix things, and the idea is that this child will grow up to feel an outsized sense of moral duty, to try to fix the world as she tried to fix her family as a child. When I first read this, I thought it was yet another one of these pathologizing theories that was just trying to explain why altruists were mentally ill, but then I realized that thinking about the people in my book, almost every single one of them falls into this category. Not all of them, but almost every single one. So I do think there is something to this, which is interesting because if you read stuff about bringing up children and how to encourage ordinary altruism, it usually talks about love, if you love your child well that child will grow up to be able to love in turn. But this seems to suggest to me that there's something about a lack of love or an absence of the kind of healthy childrearing that we all think is ideal that produces in some cases this extraordinary result."

When asked about the traits of the subjects of her book, MacFarquhar spoke of a willingness to subvert certain mores:

"They are very stubborn. They're very unconventional. To do this kind of work, you have not to care what other people think of you because other people are going to think you're a freak, and statistically speaking, you are a freak. You just have to do it anyway, even though other people are not only going to think you're freakish but even bad, especially because as we were discussing before, to devote yourself to strangers will at a certain point conflict with caring for your family, and most people feel that you should care for your family. If caring for strangers interferes with that in any way, it's not good, and that indicates that there's something deficient about you, if you override the care for family. To be the sort of altruist that I'm writing about in this book, you have to ignore the enormous weight of that societal prescription."

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