Narcissism and Self-Righteousness

When we think of a narcissistic personality, we usually think of someone who is egocentric, unempathetic, and grandiose. However, there are many different types of people who are driven by the central need to feed their sense of self. In his novel, More Than I Love my Life (New York: Knopf, 2021), David Grossman captures the subtlety of another type of narcissist—the self-righteous narcissist who derives her narcissistic validation and supply by maintaining herself as a morally superior person. Self-righteous narcissists can be confusing because they closely adhere to rigid rules and have a clear sense of right and wrong. There is a tremendous rigidity to them; they are judgmental and critical of other people who do not adhere to their standards.

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The story that Grossman tells is based on the life of Eva Panić Nahir, a Jewish woman from the former Yugoslavia who, having been imprisoned and tortured as a pro-Stalinist traitor in one of Tito’s gulags, came to Israel with her daughter, married a widower, and lived on a kibbutz. But that condensed biography barely scrapes the surface. The Serbian novelist Danilo Kiš made a television series about Eva, and there was a documentary in 2003. But Grossman, who says he had a “profound friendship” with Eva for more than 20 years until her death in 2015, unearths a narcissistic core in Eva.

Perhaps Eva’s willingness to have her story told reveals that she, like Vera Novak, Grossman’s version of her, never understands this about herself. As the title reveals, she loved that self-righteous image of herself and the idealized relationship with her husband more than she loved her life and more than she cared about her daughter’s life. She made a choice and could not admit it to her daughter.

When Vera returns to her daughter Nina after three years, Nina asks her, “Why did you and my dad both leave me on the same day?”

Vera says, “The police put us in prison.”

“And you couldn’t get out?”

“No,” said Vera.

Nina’s daughter, Gili, who is the narrator of the novel, says that was in some sense true, “but it was also the beginning of the lie that would grow and branch out” until it entangled three generations.

Vera could have been released if she was willing to say that her dead husband, Milosz, was a Stalinist—but she refused. She spends three years on an isolated island gulag for that “moral” principle. Vera’s portrayal of herself as having sacrificed her freedom and potentially her very life for her first husband evades accountability for deserting Nina. She abandons Nina to preserve her idealized connection to her dead husband and her morally superior image of herself. And just like a self-righteous narcissist, Vera’s real-life model asked David Grossman to write a novel about her!