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The empathy exams : essays

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The Empathy Exams

• “Extraordinary. . . . [Jamison’s] cerebral, witty, multichambered essays tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say we feel someone else’s pain.” — The New York Times

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• “Jamison writes with such originality and humor. . . . To articulate suffering with so much clarity, and so little judgement, is to turn pain into art.” — Entertainment Weekly
• “[A] stunning collection. . . . A profound investigation of empathy’s potential and its limits.” — Cosmopolitan , “10 Books by Women You Have to Read This Spring”

“There is a glory to this kind of writing that derives as much from its ethical generosity . . . as it does from the lovely vividness of the language itself. . . . It’s hard to imagine a stronger, more thoughtful voice emerging this year.” — The New York Times Book Review

• “At 30, [Jamison] could be a granddaughter of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. . . . The Empathy Exams is their descendant, yet Jamison’s blend of wit and brainy warmth is completely distinctive.” — The Atlantic

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Never Hurts to Ask

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By Olivia Laing

• April 4, 2014

Regarding the pain of others requires more than just a pair of eyes. It necessitates an act of the imagination: a willingness to think or feel oneself into the interior of another’s experience, to cross between what Susan Sontag once designated as the kingdoms of the sick and of the well. This kind of empathetic border crossing can be both difficult and dangerous, the sort of journey of which one might say: “I get across quickly because I’m headed in the right direction, by which I mean the wrong direction. I’m going where no one wants to stay.”

This statement, actually describing a trip into Mexico, serves as a manifesto for “The Empathy Exams,” Leslie Jamison’s extraordinary and exacting collection of essays. Jamison is a young writer and the author of a novel, “The Gin Closet.” For the past few years she’s been publishing a steady stream of intense, original essays, gathered here for the first time. Though they roam widely in topic and location, their collective preoccupation is with pain: what it means and what to do about it, both when it occurs in our own lives and when its location is far distant from us.

Jamison opens with her experience as an actor playing patients for medical students. “I’m called a standardized patient, which means I act toward the norms set for my disorders.” Sometimes, working from a script, she plays a mother whose baby’s lips are turning blue, and sometimes a young woman whose grief over her brother’s death manifests as seizures. The students are assessed on how empathically they respond to her character’s pain. Sensitive questioning elicits vital detail; clumsy handling causes the actor-patient to clam up.

“Empathy,” she writes, “means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response.” She means a porousness in the witness, a willingness to let a stranger’s troubles seep in and slowly unfurl their meaning. But there is a porousness, too, in her style. Her intricate reconstruction of the empathy exams gives way to a more personal case history, an anatomization of two medical procedures she underwent in close succession: first an abortion and then heart surgery. In the essay’s virtuosic close, she presents a script for Leslie Jamison: an intimate document, aestheticized but not anesthetized by the assumed tone, the medical dressing.

The damaged physical body, the gulf between sufferer and witness, this is Jamison’s territory. Elsewhere, she turns her searching gaze on the community of people who suffer from the condition known as Morgellons, in which patients believe they’re infested with hairs or fibers (an opportunity for some remarkable thinking about why patients prefer a diagnosis of physical infection to mental illness). She examines the culture around an ultramarathon in Tennessee, explores the case of the West Memphis Three, and considers poverty and violence in Los Angeles and Bolivia in a set of linked essays entitled “Pain Tours.” In almost all of these pieces, her own pain: getting punched in the face in Nicaragua, having a worm emerge from her ankle after a trip to Bolivia, bad boyfriends and the wounding, witty lines they’d deliver.

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Leslie Jamison’s discomfiting essays explore the pain of others and how it affects the self.

Illustration by Rem Broo

At one point in her extraordinary essay collection The Empathy Exams , Leslie Jamison mentions a phrase a boyfriend once used to characterize her—a phrase by which, some years later, she still finds herself troubled. This phrase is “wound dweller.” She doesn’t say much more about the insult, or its context, or why she has found herself dwelling so long on it. But she doesn’t need to; the reference comes in the last of the book’s 11 essays, and by this point it would be obvious to anyone who has read the previous 10 how cruelly accurate a description it is. Jamison is preoccupied with pain—with her own pain and the pain of others, and with what it means, as a writer and as a person, to be so preoccupied.

The Empathy Exams contains pieces on poverty tourism, on visiting prisoners, on the terror and violence of the Mexican narco wars, and on the ghoulish compulsions of the addiction-centered reality show Intervention . There is a superb piece in which Jamison attends a gathering of people who suffer, or feel that they suffer, from something called Morgellons Disease, a delusional condition whereby things—often colored fibers or crystals or threads, and sometimes tiny living creatures—are imagined to emerge through the skin from inside of the body. There is an essay on the West Memphis Three, who were wrongfully imprisoned in the 1990s for the supposed ritual murder of three young boys. There’s a long essay-manifesto on the difficulties of writing about female suffering—on the ease with which it can be dismissed as a cliché, and the necessity of doing so regardless. Running through all of this, stitching it together, is a strong thread of autobiographical narrative, which becomes a sort of artful self-portraiture of Jamison’s own scarring—from an abortion, from a violent mugging in Nicaragua, from a history of eating disorder and bodily self-harm.

The go-to cliché for this kind of writing, or this kind of subject matter, would be “unflinching.” That would be inaccurate in this case, because while there’s certainly a relentlessness to Jamison’s pursuit of the topic of pain, she does flinch. In fact, one of the more powerful aspects of her writing is the extent to which she is able to flinch while maintaining the steadiness of her gaze.

In the title piece, which also opens the collection, she writes about her work as a medical actor, paid to play a character suffering from a specific cluster of maladies, in order for medical students to hone their diagnostic skills. The essay becomes an exploration of the idea of empathy, of feeling your way into the suffering of another person and identifying personally with their pain. But Jamison—whose first book, The Gin Closet , was a novel—goes beyond the standard literary self-congratulations, about how empathy requires the same sorts of imaginative leaps as reading and writing fiction, and how fiction is therefore a moral force for good . Instead she asks, in various ways, whether empathy might not in fact be less about the person being identified with than the person doing the identifying.

Jamison seems, at certain points, on the verge of being creeped out by her own capacity for imaginative identification. She writes about her brother contracting Bell’s palsy, a condition which causes partial facial paralysis similar to the effects of a stroke, and of how she found herself obsessed with imagining her way into his experience. “I wasn’t feeling toward my brother,” she writes, “so much as I was feeling toward a version of myself—a self that didn’t exist but theoretically shared his misfortune. I wonder if my empathy has always been this, in every case: just a bout of hypothetical self-pity projected onto someone else. Is this ultimately just solipsism?”

Photo by Colleen Kinder

She wants an empathy that arises out of courage, but understands the extent to which it is, for her, always rooted in fear. Imagining the pain of others means flinching from it as though it were our own, out of a frightened sense that it could become our own. She refers to psychological studies in which fMRI scans have observed how the same kind of brain activity is provoked by the observation of other’s physical pain as by the experience of one’s own. She says that she feels heartened by this instinctive identification, but wonders what it might finally be good for. Much of the intellectual charge of Jamison’s writing comes from the sense that she is always looking for ways to examine her own reactions to things; no sooner has she come to some judgment or insight than she begins searching for a way to overturn it, or to deepen its complications. She flinches, and then she explores that flinch with a steady gaze.

Jamison is fascinated by the porousness of the borders between herself and others, and by the way in which that porousness can permit the smuggling in of something like solipsism. It’s rare, and quite thrilling, to encounter a writer who so elegantly incorporates her own writerly anxieties into her work, who is so composed and confident about the value of her own self-doubt. (In this sense, her writing often recalls the work of David Foster Wallace, one of many influences she openly engages with throughout the collection.) Here she is, for instance, on the peculiar way she finds herself identifying with a woman named Dawn she meets at the Morgellons gathering:

Her condition seems like a crystallization of what I’ve always felt about myself—a wrongness in my being that I could never pin or name, so I found things to pin it to: my body, my thighs, my face. This resonance is part of what compels me about Morgellons: it offers a shape for what I’ve often felt, a container or christening for a certain species of unease. Dis-ease. Though I also feel how every attempt to metaphorize the illness is also an act of violence—an argument against the bodily reality its patients insist upon.

My willingness to turn Morgellons into metaphor—as a corporeal manifestation of some abstract human tendency—is dangerous. It obscures the particular and unbidden nature of the suffering in front of me.

It would be too easy to let all these faces dissolve into correlative possibility: Morgies as walking emblems for how hard it is for all of us to live in our own skin. I feel how conveniently these lives could be sculpted to fit the metaphoric structure—or strictures—of the essay itself.

This kind of ambivalence, this doubling back on her own assumptions, is what makes Jamison such a wonderful essayist. What feels especially vital in this passage is the intensity of her self-interrogations, the dramatization of the resistance against her own literary instincts. It’s in the space of these interruptions, in this hyper-conscious flinching from herself, that the real work of writing takes place. When the inevitable happens, and she starts to suspect that she might herself be starting to suffer from Morgellons—the delusional nature of which she feels makes it all the more treacherously communicable—she tries not to think about whether she is itching. “I am trying not to take my skin for granted,” she writes; it’s a striking claim, certainly, but one that seems strangely commensurate with her aversion to any sort of complacency. What’s most fascinating about this essay is not the strange phantom illness itself, or even the way in which she keeps almost helplessly metaphorizing it (despite the tutelary spirit of Susan Sontag hovering above her, warning her against doing so); it’s the literary virtue she makes of her own necessary difficulties with both.

Writers, as Joan Didion remarked, are always selling someone out, and this is a reality of which Jamison seems always to be sharply aware. Her sense of the suffering of the people she’s writing about here is so acute that you can feel her willing herself to believe in that suffering in the same way they do. She portrays these people with a keenly affecting clarity and compassion. At one point, she’s sitting behind a man named Paul who has lost interest in the presentation taking place in the room, and is looking at photographs of his own wounds on his laptop—injuries of scratching and picking and scraping—observing the evidence of his own torment. “Even here,” she writes, “among others who identify with the same malady, he retreats into the terrible privacy of his own broken body. He brings others—strangers, briefly—into this quiet battleground, but it’s always just him again, eventually, drawn back into the cloister of his damage, that nearly unfathomable loneliness.” At the end of the essay, she returns to Paul, to her own guilt at writing about him and his fellow sufferers:

Paul told me his crazy-ass symptoms and I didn’t believe him. Or at least, I didn’t believe him the way he wanted to be believed. I didn’t believe there were parasites laying thousands of eggs under his skin, but I did believe he hurt like there were. Which was typical. I was typical. In writing this essay, how am I doing something he wouldn’t understand as betrayal? I want to say, I heard you . To say, I pass no verdicts . But I can’t say these things to him. So instead I say this: I think he can heal. I hope he does.

It’s obvious that The Empathy Exams wasn’t conceived from the beginning as a single book project. There are subcutaneous connections running throughout, though they seem to result more from an organizing cluster of obsessions than any kind of willful effort to make a major statement about empathy. One of the most enjoyably propulsive essays is “The Immortal Horizon,” a report about an insanely grueling Tennessee ultramarathon and its affably sadistic ringmaster; although it is necessarily concerned with bodily pain and self-punishment, it’s not especially concerned about pulling its thematic weight in the collection as a whole.

Like Rebecca Solnit, whose writing these pieces sometimes recall, Jamison takes full advantage of the licenses extended to the essayist—to create emotional affect through strange juxtapositions and connections, to generate meaning through long-range metaphors. Jamison’s writing is often formally inventive, but never appears to be pursuing formal invention for its own sake; it’s always a case, rather, of the material demanding some radical style of treatment, like a condition with no obvious cure. Jamison’s essay “Morphology of the Hit,” for instance, could easily have been a schematic nightmare, but winds up being devastatingly effective. It’s a short memoir about a time she spent in Nicaragua in her early 20s, during which she was mugged and savagely assaulted. The piece is modeled around the stringent formalism of Vladimir Propp, whose book Morphology of the Folktale isolated 31 plot elements, or “functions,” supposedly common to all Russian folklore. Jamison tries, and ultimately fails, to map out her experience along Propp’s narrative coordinates. The essay’s real brilliance is in its transcending its own cleverness through that failure. The problem of making sense of the experience, the nearly intractable difficulty of writing about it at all, becomes a vital part of that writing. “There is no function,” she writes in the closing lines, “designated for how this essay might begin to fill the lack or liquidate the misfortune—replace the eyes, the heart, the daylight. Everything I find is stained by a certain residue: all that blood. My face will always remind me of a stranger. And I will never know his name.”

That phrase “wound dweller” haunts Jamison so abidingly, it seems, because of its suggestion of a perverse preoccupation with pain, an indecent lingering around the sites of injury. It was delivered, presumably, with the intention that it would cause its own complicated wound. And for days after reading this beautiful and punishing book, I found that I myself was haunted by the phrase, but for a different reason. There is a type of person, after all, whose job it is to linger around the sites of injuries, to observe the damage we do to ourselves and to each other. “Wound dweller,” I realized, is an apt and troubling synonym for “writer.”

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. Graywolf.

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The Empathy Exams Essays

• Author(s) Leslie Jamison
• Publisher Graywolf Press

Print ISBN 9781555976712, 1555976719

Etext isbn 9781555970888, 1555970885.

• Available from $ 9.99 USD SKU: 9781555970888

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The Empathy Exams: Essays is written by Leslie Jamison and published by Graywolf Press. The Digital and eTextbook ISBNs for The Empathy Exams are 9781555970888, 1555970885 and the print ISBNs are 9781555976712, 1555976719. Save up to 80% versus print by going digital with VitalSource.

The Empathy Exams

56 pages • 1 hour read

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Essay 1 summary: “the empathy exams”.

Jamison opens her essay by explaining that she works as a medical actor, which means for $13.50 an hour she is given a script and pretends to have the conditions outlined in it. It also includes how and when to express symptoms, with rules in place for revealing information. Jamison then shares a portion of her specialty case script, written about a woman named Stephanie Phillips, who is experiencing seizures after the death of her brother.

Jamison then describes the process of the exam itself. The actors will wait in an examination room for the arrival of a second- or third-year medical student. The student and actor will interact with each other, exchanging information based on the behavior of the student. Following the exam, each actor is given an evaluation to gauge whether the student discovered all pertinent information, including whether they “voiced empathy for my situation/problem” (3). Jamison then describes the preparation suite for the actors, listing the different medical scenarios and the props associated with them.

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The Empathy Exams Audio CD – Unabridged, May 4, 2021

• Language English
• Publisher Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio
• Publication date May 4, 2021
• Dimensions 6.5 x 0.63 x 5.5 inches
• ISBN-10 1713548771
• ISBN-13 978-1713548775
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio; Unabridged edition (May 4, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1713548771
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1713548775
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.3 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 0.63 x 5.5 inches

About the author

Leslie jamison.

Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller, and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's and the Oxford American, among others, and she is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

To learn more about Leslie: visit her website, www.lesliejamison.com and follow her on Twitter @lsjamison.

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Customers find the content insightful and revealing. They also describe the reading experience as good, but long-winded at times. However, some find the overall quality dull, tedious, and uninspired. Opinions are mixed on the writing quality, with some finding it great and others self-indulgent and superficial. Readers also have mixed feelings about the emotional impact, with others finding the sentimentality essay especially painful to read.

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Customers find the book insightful, relatable, and compelling in its passion. They also say the author writes honestly and articulately about her own experiences. Readers also appreciate the brilliant turns of phrase and smart writing. They say the book covers a variety of subjects in a caring and meaningful way.

"...More importantly, her writing is the result of adept critical thinking and the ability to conceptualize and synthesize seemingly disparate ideas,..." Read more

"...The topics of the essays are in fact quite fascinating in scope ...." Read more

"Brilliant and unforgettable ! Jamison writes her heart, pain, and vulnerability into each essay that is as mesmerizing and as it gets...." Read more

"...The best moments of this book are the simple , understated ones, and while Jamison sometimes inserts wordier constructions, the tone of her essays..." Read more

Customers find the book a good read, but a little long winded at times. They also mention that the first couple of chapters are interesting.

"...to break out from the MFA Chinese finger trap to write an engaging and relevant book ...." Read more

"...This is among the finest contemporary books I've ever read." Read more

"This is an astonishingly wonderful book that gets to the heart of the great conflict of her generation...." Read more

"Honestly one of the best books I've ever read--definitely my favorite this year...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality of the book. Some find the writing great and brilliant, while others say it's self-indulgent, shallow, and disjointed.

"I enjoyed this loosely connected essays. The writing is quite polished , and several of the essays rise to the level of the best of what's out there,..." Read more

"...The language is not easy to read in a sitting...." Read more

"...while Jamison sometimes inserts wordier constructions, the tone of her essays are unified ...." Read more

"...The author is young and brilliant (Harvard, Yale, Iowa Writer's Workshop), but I held off writing a review because my reaction was so negative...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the emotional impact of the book. Some mention that the author has a good heart and a strong mind. They also say that the book explores empathy in a cool way and has sensitivity. However, some customers find the essay on sentimentality painful to read and depressing in parts.

"...It received much praise in the popular press, started off with an exceptionally strong essay , and explored an important theme, but I found that--..." Read more

"...The essay on sentimentality was especially painful to read - a mess of quotations and false dichotomies...." Read more

"...She has a good heart , a strong mind, and a lot to say...." Read more

"...writes about complicated issues in a way that's thought-provoking, forgiving , and ultimately hopeful...." Read more

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"...one, at least, of these essays, the one on saccharin, is a perfect mockery of some MFA or workshop writing programs creative non-fiction cobbled..." Read more

"...It feels insincere , as though she were approaching the people and situations solely from the point of seeking material for her essays...." Read more

"I like the idea behind this book but it didn't keep me very engaged . I doubt I would have finished it if I hadn't been reading it for a book club." Read more

"I thought this book was very overrated . The first couple of chapters were very interesting, but over all I was not impressed with the book." Read more

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"...a necessary element for me in judging writing, however she can be just too confusing ...." Read more

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Leslie Jamison

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.

Pre-Order on Bookshop.org

Pre-Order on Amazon Leslie Jamison is among our most beloved contemporary voices, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. In Splinters, her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of her most intimate relationships: new motherhood, a ruptured marriage, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once, Jamison juxtaposes the magical and the mundane in surprising ways. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, a deep reckoning that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another. How do we move forward into joy while haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page, full of the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics. A master of nonfiction, Jamison evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).

Advance Praise for Splinters

“Leslie Jamison’s blazing memoir kept me riveted for the single day it took to guzzle it down. This wry, hilarious, and unputdownable book is a gift that feels like an immediate hit and a forever classic.” —Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of Lit and The Liar’s Club “Splinters is as sharp and piercing as its title—a brilliant reckoning with what it means to make art, a self, a family, a life. If I were offered one guide as a writer, as a mother, as a teacher, as a human being constantly reinventing herself out of necessity, I’d want that guide to be Leslie Jamison. This memoir is a masterclass.” —Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful “Splinters is a stunning portrait of the intricate tapestry of human emotions. On every page, in exquisite prose, Jamison unearths moments of luminosity and grace amid pain. Giving language to fundamental experiences of love, grief, and parenthood all too often skirted past, this book is essential reading for anyone who cares about the power of language to help us find solace and recompense.” —Meghan O’Rourke, New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Kingdom “Leslie Jamison’s memoir, Splinters, is a stairway behind the eyes of a woman in the midst of transformation, written so brilliantly, and with such a skilled hand, that readers are likely to find themselves peacefully lost even in its darker moments. These pages are so magnetizing that I wanted to race along, but forced myself to slow down enough to savor the language. No one should be this good at writing. This gorgeous book will blow you away.” —Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody’s Daughter “An astonishing achievement. This is a memoir of emotional depth that reminds us of how love, in its fullness, is as much a construction of jagged and flinty edges as it is an ideal of cloudless skies. In Splinters, Leslie Jamison is unstinting in her assessment of marriage gained and lost, of motherhood held close, and of loving oneself in the process, all conveyed with her unsparing and attentive eye.” —Esmé Weijun Wang, New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias “Jamison’s genius—a word I use without hyperbole—is her capaciousness, how she gives us the blushing baby and the shitty diapers, the sweeping romances and their residue. We see Jamison half-whirling like Rumi in the throes of ecstatic love for a new daughter, knowing her ecstasy is real because she renders it wholly, alongside the pulverizing lonelinesses of loving deeply. Splinters is a praise song for what remains unannihilated, what has been salvaged from a time—a world—of annihilation. I find in Jamison’s work what I’ve sought my entire life: a rigorous and attentive steward for whom dailiness deepens, instead of diminishes, awe.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf “Christ Almighty this book is good. It’s a masterpiece. No one else I’ve read has captured motherhood—the painful overabundance of it, the extreme delight, the cascading fears—the way Leslie Jamison does in Splinters. No one else I’ve read has evoked so powerfully what it feels like to be pulled by too many competing tethers until you’re half a mother, half a writer, barely a wife, hardly a real person. The electric truth at the heart of this book is that, in this shattering and reassembling, you’re reorganized into a new kind of person, one attuned to abundance, open to chaos and surprise, gratified by the tiny pleasures of being alive. In Splinters, Jamison offers us an emotionally rich odyssey on the terrors and triumph of becoming whole.” —Heather Havrilesky, author of Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage and the “Ask Polly” advice column “I didn’t realize I needed someone to write this book. As it turns out, I needed Leslie Jamison to write this book. It moved me so much and hooked me so quickly. I absolutely consumed it, this book about hunger and aftermath, about pleasure and beauty and silencing and speaking up, and that new language you get to invent and learn at the same time with your child. Splinters is enormously satisfying—full of passages, images, and ideas that are, quite simply, some of my favorite things I’ve ever read.” —Mary-Louise Parker, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Mr. You, and Emmy, Golden Globe, and Tony Award winner “In Splinters, Jamison offers a riveting portrait of rupture that is at once a page-turner about divorce, a romance about parenthood, a mystery of self after splintering, and a promise that however many times we break or are broken, art and love will never fail to mend us.” —Melissa Febos, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and national bestseller Girlhood

About Leslie

I was born in Washington DC and grew up in Los Angeles. Since then, I've lived in Iowa, Nicaragua, New Haven, and (currently) Brooklyn. I've worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, a juice barista, a GAP clerk, and a medical actor. Every one of these was a world; they're still in me. These days I teach at the Columbia University MFA program, where I direct the nonfiction concentration. 

My new book, a memoir called Splinters , comes out in February 2024. It’s been a journey, as I’ve always found February the trickiest month to spell correctly. Please email the amazing Lena (see below!) if you’d like an advance copy. I've also written two essay collections— The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn —a critical memoir, The Recovering, and a novel, The Gin Closet. I’ve also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Oxford American , A Public Space , Virginia Quarterly Review , and The Believer .  

Lena Little:

Lena.little [at] hbgusa [dot] com

Literary Representation

jauh [at] wylieagency [dot] com

Speaking Engagements

Trinity Ray, Tuesday Agency:

trinity [at] tuesdayagency [dot] com

319-338-7080

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

The Recovering

Entertainment Weekly’s #1 Nonfiction Book of 2018!

Literary Hub’s #1 Best-Reviewed Memoir of 2018!

“An astounding triumph....A recovery memoir like no other ....Jamison is a writer of prodigious ambition....Here, she’s a bare-it-all memoirist, an astute critic, and a diligent archivist all in one. The book knows no bounds, building in depth and vitality with each passing concern....There’s something profound at work here, a truth about how we grow into ourselves that rings achingly wise and burrows painfully deep.”— Entertainment Weekly

  “Magnificent and genuinely moving. This is that rare addiction memoir that gets better after sobriety takes hold.” —New York Times

“Poignant....Taut and immediate. ” — Village Voice

“A sprawling, compelling, fiercely ambitious book ....Its publication represents the most significant new addition to the canon in more than a decade....Jamison’s writing throughout is spectacularly evocative and sensuous....She thinks with elegant precision, cutting through the whiskey-soaked myths....Jamison is interested in something else: the possibility that sobriety can form its own kind of legend, no less electric, and more generative in the end .”— The Atlantic

 “Such is Jamison’s command of metaphor and assonance that she could rivet a reader with a treatise on toast. We perhaps have no writer better on the subject of psychic suffering and its consolations.” — The New Yorker

 “ Fascinating....energetic, colorful, fun, buzzy, affecting, and spot-on ....Emotional, as well as factual, honesty is the sine qua non of a memoir. Yet this kind of deep honesty—the merciless self-examination and exposure that Jamison displays—is increasingly rare.” — New York Times Book Review

   “ A remarkable feat ....Jamison is a bracingly smart writer; her sentences wind and snake, at turns breathless and tense....Instead of solving the mystery of why she drank, she does something worthier, digging underneath the big emptiness that lives inside every addict to find something profound.”— Time

  “Riveting ....Jamison orchestrates a multi-voiced, universal song of lack, shame, surrender, uncertain and unsentimental redemption....It is a pleasure and feels like a social duty to report that Jamison’s book shines sunlight on these creepy, crepuscular enchantments. Wisdom floods the scene, and genius never flees. Quite on its own terms, The Recovering is a beautifully told example of the considered and self-aware becoming art.” —Boston Globe

  “Thoughtful, fiercely honest, and intimate, The Recovering is a must-read that is Jamison at her best.”— BuzzFeed

“Gritty....Raw....Thought-provoking and distinct.... Fascinating in ways you might not expect.... The Recovering  ventures beyond the cliché and the ordinary to remind us once again of both the fallibility and resiliency of the human condition.”       — San Francisco Chronicle

“ Precise and heartfelt.... The Recovering  is a magnificent achievement. ”        — Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“ Wonderful....wholly original....it shines .”       — USA Today

“As a reader of this most consuming book,  I celebrate Jamison’s deep openheartedness, deliberate unselfishness, immaculate, inculcating vision, and her language— oh, her language....For her intelligence, her compassion, her capaciousness, her search, her deep reading, her precise language, Jamison must be honored here .”        — Chicago Tribune

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage,  The Recovering  turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction—both her own and others’—and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.

At the heart of the book is Jamison’s ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, and David Foster Wallace, as well as lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here. Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison’s own ordeals,  The Recovering  also becomes about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, “broken spigots of need.” It’s about the particular loneliness of the human experience—the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are.

For her striking language and piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.

Order it on Indiebound here . 

Barnes & Noble

Make It Scream, Make It Burn

Pre-order on IndieBound .

Pre-order on Amazon .

Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein–Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ONE OF THE FALL'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS: Time, Entertainment Weekly, O, Oprah Magazine, Boston Globe, Seattle Times, BuzzFeed, Newsweek, Bustle, Woman’s Day, Nylon, BookPage, The Millions, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Lit Hub, AV Club, Goop, Book Riot, Pacific Standard, The Week, and Romper.

“Jamison has emerged as a giant in the world of creative nonfiction. She returns with a beautifully compiled collection of essays reflecting on obsession and longing.”— Entertainment Weekly

 “This wide-ranging essay collection is insightful and searching, exciting and staggering. Jamison interweaves memoir, journalism, and cultural criticism into essays that explore topics like motherhood, romance, and relationships… Jamison has been compared to such greats as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, so if you enjoy those, you'll love this one.”— Good Housekeeping

“In her new essay collection, Jamison allows herself to roam beyond the boundaries of one issue, and instead latches her powerful, precise observations to a number of unconventional topics.”—Cristina Arreola, Bustle

"These perceptive essays demonstrate that the best-selling author of The Empathy Exams continues to explore the limits of human connections." --- Elle

"To fortify and enlarge the world through eloquence--apt descriptions of Jamison's new collection...Another wonderful book from this gifted writer." --- The Millions

“Leslie Jamison's astonishingly formidable, restless intellect has gifted us two monumental works of nonfiction: 2014's The Empathy Exams, and last year's The Recovering. Here, she turns her exacting eye on subjects such as the loneliest whale in the world and a Croatian museum filled with the effluvia of failed relationships.”— O, The Oprah Magazine

“If you ever need to be reminded of the potential of the essay and why essay collections matter or if you just want to get excited about one, read Leslie Jamison…In Make It Scream, Make it Burn, three of the most poignant and personal essays come in the final section: one on Jamison’s own marriage…A brilliant exploration of what it means to be a stepmother…and the last, an essay on giving birth that flips back and forth between Jamison’s pregnancy and an eating disorder that marked her earlier experiences of her body.”— Goop

"Illuminating and ruminative...Jamison is positively brilliant when penetrating a subject and unraveling its layers of meaning...Fans of the author's unique brand of perceptiveness will be delighted."

       --- Publishers Weekly

“A whirlwind exploration of longing and obsession… How could you not be intrigued?”— Marie Claire

"Richly diverse…The pieces in Make It Scream, Make It Burn are all written with care and intricacy, drawing readers in and making us care…Jamison's observational skills, genuine empathy, and lack of sentimentality create an intelligent blending of journalism, scholarship, and memoir."

       --- Pam Kingsbury, Library Journal

"Insightful...The essays in the collection (which can easily be torn through, though should really be savored) contain observations on an eclectic array of subjects...Like the glass in a kaleidoscope, Jamison's fine-tuned attention seems capable of refracting whatever subject it touches. When I finally looked up from the page it was with a renewed sense of wonder."

       --- Cornelia Channing, The Paris Review

"Leslie Jamison is a master of blending memoir, criticism and journalism...[her] characteristic fusion of the intellectual and emotional is in full force here, cementing comparisons of her work to that of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag."

       --- Christy Lynch, Bookpage

"Even as she documents the experiences of others--Sri Lankan soldiers, Second Life superusers, eminent writers and photographers--Jamison is keenly aware of how her personal experiences shape the way she reports their stories. It's this knowledge that propels the collection, along with her rejection of cynicism in favor of being open to new ideas and experiences, no matter how foreign they may seem."

 --- Maris Kreizman, Pacific Standard

"Jamison is one of my favorite working essayists...[In] Make It Scream, Make It Burn [she] dances between the personal, the critical, and the observational, showing her deftness when it comes to each form." --- Jeva Lange, The Week

"Magnetizing and thought-provoking...An edgy spirit of inquiry, a penchant for sharing personal experiences, and incandescent writing skills make Jamison an exciting premier essayist."--- Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Leslie Jamison is a writer of supreme eloquence and intelligence who deftly combines journalistic, critical and memoiristic approaches to produce essays that linger long in the memory." --- LitHub

"Jamison interrogates a variety of fascinating subjects, including her own life, in her praiseworthy second essay collection... Make It Scream, Make It Burn confirms the praise heaped on 2014's The Empathy Exams for her uncanny ability to blend perceptive reportage with intensely personal essays in consistently fresh, dynamic prose.”  --- Harvey Freedenberg , Shelf Awareness

MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN is a collection of fourteen essays exploring the dynamics of haunting and obsession. I look at how we are defined by what we can’t ever fully grasp, from the ghosts of possible prior lives to the perpetually unfinished work of documentary art, from the alternate selves of our online avatars to the specters of broken romances. If my first collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, explored the perilous allure of empathy, this collection examines what happens not when we look but when we can’t look away—when we find ourselves consumed by desire or fascination.

 The structure of MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN serves as a mirror image to The Empathy Exams . Whereas the latter started with the personal and gradually turned outward, MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN progresses from the outward-looking to the deeply personal. It begins with a trio of pieces of longform reportage: an account of the “loneliest whale in the world” and his devoted followers, an exploration of children who vividly member their past lives, and an examination of those who find community in the virtual world of Second Life. In the pages that follow, it takes readers to Sri Lanka to survey the residue of its Civil War, offers the definitive critical account of  an outsider artist’s 25-year documentary photography project on both sides of the US/Mexico border, and ruminates on a museum devoted to the breakups of ordinary strangers. I ultimately turn to the achingly personal, examining my own life as a site of strangeness and mystery, considering the dynamics of obsession, haunting, and longing in essays about weddings, infidelity,  elopement in Las Vegas, becoming a stepmother, and my own pregnancy juxtaposed against an eating disorder years before. These are essays about how we are composed by what we long for, and by living in uneasy relation to what we have.

The Empathy Exams

New York Times  Bestseller, Notable Book of 2014, and Editors' Choice. Named a Top 10 Book of 2014 by Entertainment Weekly, Publisher's Weekly, Oprah, Slate, Salon, the L Magazine, and Time Out: New York. Finalist for the ABA Indies Choice Award and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Published in the UK, Brazil, Germany, Holland, Italy, France, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Korea, and China. 

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison’s visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How can we feel another’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? By confronting pain—real and imagined, her own and others’—Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

Buy the book at Indiebound.

Buy the book at Powell's .

“Extraordinary. . . . she calls to mind writers as disparate as Joan Didion and John Jeremiah Sullivan as she interrogates the palpitations of not just her own trippy heart but of all of ours. . . . Her cerebral, witty, multichambered essays tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say we feel someone else's pain. . . . I'm not sure I'm capable of recommending a book because it might make you a better person. But watching the philosopher in Ms. Jamison grapple with empathy is a heart-expanding exercise.” ― Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Extraordinary and exacting. . . . This capacity for critical thinking, for a kind of cool skepticism that never gives way to the chilly blandishments of irony, is very rare. It's not surprising that Jamison is drawing comparisons to Sontag. . . . There is a glory to this kind of writing that derives as much from its ethical generosity, the palpable sense of stretch and reach, as it does from the lovely vividness of the language itself. . . . It's hard to imagine a stronger, more thoughtful voice emerging this year.” ― The New York Times Book Review

“Jamison writes with sober precision and unusual vulnerability, with a tendency to circle back and reexamine, to deconstruct and anticipate the limits of her own perspective, and a willingness to make her own medical and psychological history the objects of her examinations. Her insights are often piercing and poetic.” ― The New Yorker, "Books to Watch Out For"

“This quirky, insightful collection dazzles.” ― People

“If reading a book about [pain] sounds . . . painful, rest assured that Jamison writes with such originality and humor, and delivers such scalpel-sharp insights, that it's more like a rush of pleasure. . . . To articulate suffering with so much clarity, and so little judgement, is to turn pain into art.” ― Entertainment Weekly, Grade: A-

“A virtuosic manifesto of human pain. . . . Jamison stitches together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon. . . . The result is a soaring performance on the humanizing effects of empathy.” ― NPR

“Extraordinary. . . . Much of the intellectual charge of Jamison's writing comes from the sense that she is always looking for ways to examine her own reactions to things; no sooner has she come to some judgment or insight than she begins searching for a way to overturn it, or to deepen its complications. She flinches, and then she explores that flinch with a steady gaze. . . . [A] beautiful and punishing book.” ― Slate

“A brilliant collection. . . . We're in a new golden age of the essay . . . and in The Empathy Exams Leslie Jamison has announced herself as its rising star.” ― The Boston Globe

“Remarkable. . . . [Jamison] combines the intellectual rigor of a philosopher, the imagination of a novelist and a reporter's keen eye for detail in these essays, which seamlessly blend reportage, cultural criticism, theory and memoir.” ― Los Angeles Times

“A stunning collection. . . . a profound investigation of empathy's potential and its limits.” ― Cosmopolitan, "10 Books by Women You Have to Read This Spring"

“[Jamison] writes consistently with passion and panache; her sentences are elegantly formed, her voice on the page intimate and insistent. Always intelligent, self-questioning, willing to experiment with form, daring to engage with the weird and thrust herself into danger spots, a patient researcher and voracious processor of literature and critical theory, she is the complete package: state-of-the-art nonfiction.” ― Phillip Lopate, San Francisco Chronicle

“[Jamison] writes with intellectual precision and a deep emotional engagement. . . .  The Empathy Exams is a gracefully powerful attempt by a tremendously talented young writer to articulate the ways in which we might all work to become better versions of ourselves.” ― Star Tribune

“Jamison is determined to tell us what she sees and thinks without condescension or compromise, and as a consequence her act of witnessing is moving, stimulating, and disturbing in equal measure. . . . Jamison is always interesting, often gripping.” ― Bookforum

“ The Empathy Exams is a work of tremendous pleasure and tremendous pain. Leslie Jamison is so intelligent, so compassionate, and so fiercely, prodigiously brave. This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best.” ― Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries, winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize

“Leslie Jamison threads her fine mind through the needle of emotion, sewing our desire for feeling to our fear of feeling. Her essays pierce both pain and sweetness.” ― Eula Biss

“Leslie Jamison has written a profound exploration into how empathy deepens us, yet how we unwittingly sabotage our own capacities for it. We care because we are porous, she says. Pain is at once actual and constructed, feelings are made based on how you speak them. This riveting book will make you a better writer, a better human.” ― Mary Karr

“ The Empathy Exams  is a necessary book, a brilliant antidote to the noise of our time. Intellectually rigorous, it's also plainly personal, honest and intimate, clear-eyed about its confusions. It's about the self as something other than a bundle of symptoms, it's about female pain and the suffering of solitary souls everywhere, it's an exploration of empathy and the poverty of our imaginations, it's ultimately about the limits of language and the liberating possibilities of a whole new narrative. . . .  The Empathy Exams  earns its place on the shelf alongside Sontag.” ― Charles D'Ambrosio

“These essays--risky, brilliant, and full of heart--ricochet between what it is to be alive and to be a creature wondering what it is to be alive. Jamison's words, torqued to a perfect balance, shine brightly, allowing both fury and wonder to open inside us.” ― Nick Flynn

“Leslie Jamison positions herself in one fraught subject position after the next: tourist in the suffering of others, guilt-ridden person of privilege, keenly intelligent observer distrustful of pure cleverness, reclaimer and critic of female suffering, to name but a few. She does so in order to probe her endlessly important and difficult subject--empathy, for the self and for others--a subject this whirling collection of essays turns over rock after rock to explore. Its perambulations are wide-ranging; its attentiveness to self and others, careful and searching; its open heart, true.” ― Maggie Nelson

“Leslie Jamison writes with her whole heart and an unconfined intelligence, a combination that gives The Empathy Exams --an inquiry into modern ways and problems of feeling--a persuasive, often thrilling authority. These essays reach out for the world, seeking the extraordinary, the bizarre, the alone, the unfeeling, and finding always what is human.” ― Michelle Orange

“Brilliant. At times steel-cold or chili-hot, [Jamison] picks her way through a society that has lost its way, a voyeur of voyeurism. Here now comes the post-Sontag, post-modern American essay.” ― Ed Vulliamy, author of Amexica: War Along the Borderline

“When we chance upon a work and a writer who summons and dares the full tilt of all her volatile resources, intellectual and emotional, personal and historical, the effect is, well, disorienting, astonishing. We crash into wonder, as she says, and the span of topics Jamison tosses up is correspondingly smashing and wondrous: medical actors, sentimentality, violence, plastic surgery, guilt, diseases, the Barkley Marathons, stylish 'ex-votos' for exemplary artists, incarceration, wounds, scars, fear, yearning, community, and the mutations of physical pain.” ― Robert Polito, from his Afterword

The Gin Closet

Finalist for the  Los Angeles Times  Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. One of the  San Francisco Chronicle's  Best Books of 2010.

Buy the book at Powell's.

Publishers’ Weekly:

“ Starred Review. Jamison's beautifully written debut follows independent young New Yorker Stella and her estranged aunt Tilly as they form some version of a family… The relationship between Stella and Tilly is compelling…what truly drives the novel is Jamison's gorgeous prose.”

“First-time novelist Jamison portrays three generations of ‘wounded women’ in an exquisite blues of a novel…Narrating by turns in each lonely woman’s voice, Jamison creates emotionally complex scenes of harsh revelation in language as scorching as gin…Jamison’s novel of solitary confinement within one’s pain is hauntingly beautiful.”

San Francisco Chronicle:

  "The Gin Closet" is no escapist fantasy but a slow and steady heartbreak. It is also exquisitely beautiful. Jamison writes like a poet, her imagery breathtaking, her sentences unfurling unpredictably, to the novel's devastating end… "The Gin Closet" is a classical tragedy. The characters are doomed to repeat their mistakes, haunted by the past, unable to save themselves or each other. But while the plot precludes redemption, language is a saving grace both for the novel and in their lives. We may not be able to change, but at least we can tell our stories, finding flashes of beauty even in the ugliest things.”

Buffalo News:

“Life is raw in Leslie Jamison’s astonishing first novel, a story of love and ruin in the American West…it is a book that finds beauty in dysfunction — and, in doing so, gives us one of the truest and most devastating depictions of alcoholism to be had in some time…“The Gin Closet” is nothing short of a tour de force.”

  A “keenly felt” exploration of “love’s more complex geometries.”

New Haven Advocate:

  “Jamison's voice is resoundingly unique, her prose both raw and precise, fully attuned to poetry without ever rescinding an energetic narrative impulse… Jamison trusts the consciousness of her characters and her readers. At the very points a lesser writer would stumble, lurch and turn away, she stands still, stares and turns our faces to stare along with her… Of particular importance is the oblique beauty and taut sensuality of Jamison's language and imagery… Jamison is not just marching to the beat of her own drum. She is banging out a brutal, ecstatic symphony upon it. The Gin Closet dares readers to understand how and why we abrade our bodies, ourselves, to manifest the incommunicable to one another.”

Time Out New York:

  “Jamison is no coward…she writes courageously about disease, sex and perils of the flesh without flinching… she’ll become a strong voice in contemporary fiction.”

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