Review by New York Times Review
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. This is an approach fraught with dangers, which necessitates walking an ethical tightrope between voyeurism and narcissism, between an unnatural interest in the woes of others and an unattractive obsession with the wounds of the self. It is to Jamison's credit that she doesn't choose the easy neutrality of the distanced observer, but rather voyages deeply into both extremes, maintaining almost always an admirable awareness about the perils of her approach. Throughout, she pays close attention to the mechanisms of empathy, addressing not only its importance, as Rebecca Solnit did in last year's "The Faraway Nearby," but also its ethical complexities. In an essay that tacks brilliantly between a consideration of saccharine sentimentality and the artificial sweetener saccharin, she notes how sentimentality and antisentiment charm us by "coaxing out the vision of ourselves we'd most like to see," continuing: "If the saccharine offers some undiluted spell of feeling,... then perhaps its value lies in the process of emerging from its thrall: that sense of unmasking, that sense of guilt." 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, clearly an influence on much of the thinking here. The struggle between irony and empathy surfaces again in two of the more troubling essays of the collection, a linked manifesto on the importance of accepting female woundedness as a subject worthy of attention. I can't say I much like the heavy-handed gender essentialism of her approach, or the moments of over-identification with her subjects, something her best essays rarely permit. On the subject of the plaster corsets Frida Kahlo wore to support her damaged spine, Jamison writes, "She would have given anything, perhaps, to have a body that rendered them irrelevant," adding that after Kahlo's leg was amputated, "she died the next year, as if this loss - after so many others - was what she finally couldn't bear." This is both histrionic and reductive. But it's a danger in keeping with her larger point, which is that it's worth risking an excess of feeling, rather than taking up the fashionable pose of world-weariness, which all too easily shades into detachment and then to cruelty. Jamison is capable of the most extraordinary flourishes of image. On the case of the West Memphis Three, in which three teenagers were imprisoned for 17 years for the murder of three boys (wrongfully, many believe; they have since been freed), she writes: "Years ago witches were torched like fields. Their bodies held the controlled burn. Their bodies held evil like vessels so that evil would not be understood as something diffused across other bodies, across everyone." 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. These are the essays of a working journalist. Most have been previously published in magazines like Vice, Harper's and Oxford American. Because they all work to some degree over the narrow field of personal experience, they inevitably turn up the same items of autobiography, perpetually introduced as if for the first time. This has a strange, unwitting effect in a book so preoccupied with the registering of and response to distress - it makes Jamison sound self-preoccupied, too caught up in her own stories to recognize that the reader has encountered them before. A small point, and clearly a consequence of the form, it makes one wonder a little hankeringly what this collection could have been if it had been worked just a touch more. But perhaps this is greedy. It's hard to imagine a stronger, more thoughtful voice emerging this year. 'Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.' OLIVIA LAING'S latest book is "The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 6, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Jamison wrote about wounded women in her powerful novel, The Gin Closet (2010), and she pursues that subject in this collection of gutsy essays. But the line of inquiry that connects these riveting works of acute description and exacting moral calculus, these amalgams of memoir and risky investigative adventures is Jamison's attempt to discern and define empathy in diverse and dicey situations. She begins with an account of her experiences working as a medical actor, performing as patients with baffling ailments that medical students must diagnose, encounters that deliver the realization that empathy requires humility and imagination. She discloses her own medical travails and asks, When does empathy actually reinforce the pain it wants to console? Jamison's mission to put empathy to the test is more covert and even more provocative in her wrenching chronicles of drug-war-ravaged Mexico; Nicaragua, where a man attacks her and breaks her nose; a silver mine in Bolivia; and a Gang Tour in Los Angeles explorations that inject guilt into the equation. A tough, intrepid, scouring observer and vigilant thinker, she generates startling and sparking extrapolations and analysis. On the prowl for truth and intimate with pain, Jamison carries forward the fierce and empathic essayistic tradition as practiced by writers she names as mentors, most resonantly James Agee and Joan Didion.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Jamison's (The Gin Closet) first collection of essays, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, is a heady and unsparing examination of pain and how it allows us to understand others, and ourselves. Whether she's playacting symptoms for medical students as a medical actor, learning about the controversial Morgellons disease (delusional parasitosis), or following ultramarathoners through the rugged Tennessee mountains, Jamison is ever-probing and always sensitive. Reporting is never the point; instead, her observations of people, reality TV, music, film, and literature serve as a starting point for unconventional metaphysical inquiries into poverty tourism, prison time, random acts of violence, abortion, HBO's Girls, bad romance, and stereotypes of the damaged woman artist. She focuses on physical and emotional wounds because, as she writes, "discomfort is the point. Friction arises from an asymmetry." For Jamison, that friction shatters the cliches about suffering that create distance between people, resulting in a more honest-and empathetic-way of seeing. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Jamison (The Gin Closet) notes that empathy is "a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves." In this collection of 11 essays, which take place in many different regions of the world including Central America, Bolivia, South Central Los Angeles, and Tennessee, the author does pay attention. She writes about a variety of subjects such as reality television, Tijuana, Frida Kahlo, ultra marathons, the West Memphis Three, illness, female suffering, and working as a medical actor, examining some very difficult topics with intelligent candor. The types of empathy-self, painful, guilt, fearful-evoked when reading the pieces are as varied as their subject matter. Jamison illustrates self-empathy, for example, when openly describing traumatic events in her personal life, including when she was violently mugged in Nicaragua; cleverly woven into the retelling of this painful and terrifying ordeal is -Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale. VERDICT Winner of the 2011 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, these essays will inspire readers to reflect on their own feelings of empathy-not an easy feat in today's disinterested society. This provocative collection will appeal to many types of readers.-Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A dazzling collection of essays on the human condition.In her nonfiction debut, the winner of the 2011 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, Jamison (The Gin Closet, 2010) presents 11 essays that probe pain alongside analyses of its literal and literary trappings. Whether tackling societal woes such as strip mining, drug wars, disease and wrongful imprisonment, or slippery abstract constructs including metaphor, sentimentality, confession and "gendered woundedness," Jamison masterfully explores her incisive understanding of the modern condition. The author's self-conscious obsession with subjectivity and openness to the jarringly unfamiliar become significant themes. In the title essay, for example, the author uses her job as a medical actortasked with pretending to be a patient afflicted with a predetermined illness in the service of measuring medical students' diagnostic skills and bedside mannersas a springboard for examining the meaning of empathy and her relation to it. "Empathy comes from the Greek empatheiaem (into) and pathos (feeling)a penetration, a kind of travel," she writes. "It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?" Jamison's uncanny ease in crossing boundaries between the philosophical and the personal enables her both to isolate an interiority of feeling and capture it in accessible metaphorical turns of phrase: "Melodrama is something to binge on: cupcakes in the closet." Throughout, Jamison exhibits at once a journalist's courage to bear witness to acts and conditions that test human limitsincarceration, laboring in a silver mine, ultramarathoning, the loss of a child, devastating heartbreak, suffering from an unacknowledged illnessand a poet's skepticism at her own motives for doing so. It is this level of scrutiny that lends these provocative explorations both earthy authenticity and moving urgency.A fierce, razor-sharp, heartwarming nonfiction debut. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
