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By James Parker

Keep your flaps ajar, brother; lower your filters, sister; and you’ll get more stuff to write about.

Image James Parker Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

A friend of mine was frustrated with the book he was reading — a biography of somebody or other. The author seemed to dislike his subject, which for my friend constituted a form of professional misconduct, a beam in the biographer’s eye. “We’re not getting the full story,” he fretted. And then he dropped the big line: “A biography should only be written in the key of sympathy.”

Interestingly, ironically — or perhaps neither — this friend and I are no longer speaking. We ran out of sympathy, went off-key, something went wrong. But I’ve hung on to that line of his, because I think it expresses both a core value in human relationships and an important literary practice. Namely: If you don’t open your heart to somebody, feel the weight of his individuality, expose yourself to his predicament, how can you possibly hope to understand him? Sympathy, empathy, same thing. And “open your heart” is a cliché, I know, soulful-­mechanical jargon. But it means something, so let’s put it another way: Keep your flaps ajar, brother; lower your filters, sister; and you’ll get more data, more details, more stuff to write about.

What are the risks of openness, of unfilteredness — of a life of gaping flaps? Well, you can be deceived; you can be ripped off; you can be destroyed by bores; you can be overwhelmed. And you can get hurt. Sometimes you might have to get hurt. In this last respect I’ve always admired the violent postscript of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Hell’s Angels” — wherein the author, after a year of riding with the Angels and getting his story, is arbitrarily and with summary brutality “stomped” by some of his subjects. It’s nasty, but it’s apt, because it represents Thompson’s ritual extraction or expulsion from the milieu of his book: The immersion kick is over, the price is paid, and the writing can begin. Also: We’re all modern people, incarcerated in our subjectivity, and a genuine breakout experience of the Other — the person, the Hell’s Angel in front of us — comes to us via the grace of God alone. Which is to say, unpredictably and as a gift. Nonetheless it’s the only way to go, the only thing to aim for, especially if you’re writing that person’s story. Good novelists know all this by instinct. To the degree that you are using a person, a character, simply to propel your plot or give shape to your ideas, to that same degree you are denying this character his or her full reality — and your story will suffer accordingly. Where empathy stops, in other words, exploitation starts.

I was recently given a rather astonishing little book called “Stories From the Shadows,” by James J. O’Connell, M.D. “Dr. Jim,” as he’s known on the streets of Boston, where for 30 years he has been bringing medical treatment to the homeless, is a scrupulous clinician and a skillful writer, and his book takes the form — outwardly — of a sequence of case histories and clinical encounters. Patients are initially characterized by the physical or psychological symptoms they present — pulmonary tuberculosis, paranoid schizophrenia — and the various treatment options are explored. But then, as Dr. O’Connell digs into each patient’s medical history, and slowly illuminates his or her current circumstances, something else happens. A personality begins to emerge. A voice begins to be heard. And an interior — charged, spiritual, essential — begins to make itself known. It’s an extraordinarily instructive process. Here, one feels, is empathy, the real deal: not a rushed and sloppy embrace, or a sweaty effort to relate, but something alert, and expert, and observant, and profoundly respectful.

James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and has written for Slate, The Boston Globe and Arthur magazine. He was a staff writer at The Boston Phoenix and in 2008 won a Deems Taylor Award for music criticism from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.