Leslie Jamison

A collection of essays explores empathy, using topics ranging from street violence and incarceration to reality television and literary sentimentality to ask questions about people's understanding of and relationships with others.

Essays

The Empathy Exams

From the "astounding" (Entertainment Weekly), "spectacularly evocative" (The Atlantic), and "brilliant" (Los Angeles Times) author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes a return to the essay form in this expansive new book. With the virtuosic synthesis of memoir, criticism, and journalism for which she has become known, Leslie Jamison offers us fourteen new essays that are by turns ecstatic, searching, staggering, and wise. In its kaleidoscopic sweep, Make It Scream, Make It Burn creates a profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession. Among Jamison's subjects are 52 Blue, deemed "the loneliest whale in the world"; the eerie past-life memories of children; the devoted citizens of an online world called Second Life; the haunted landscape of the Sri Lankan Civil War; and an entire museum dedicated to the relics of broken relationships. Jamison follows these examinations to more personal reckonings -- with elusive men and ruptured romances, with marriage and maternity -- in essays about eloping in Las Vegas, becoming a stepmother, and giving birth. Often compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, and widely considered one of the defining voices of her generation, Jamison interrogates her own life with the same nuance and rigor she brings to her subjects. Indeed, this refusal to hide -- this emotional and intellectual frankness -- is precisely the quality that makes her questing and irrepressible voice impossible to resist.

Make It Scream, Make It Burn

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "An astounding triumph . . . Profound . . . Achingly wise . . . A recovery memoir like no other." --Entertainment Weekly (A) "Riveting . . . Beautifully told." --Boston Globe "An honest and important book . . . Vivid writing and required reading." --Stephen King "Perceptive and generous-hearted . . . Uncompromising . . . Jamison is a writer of exacting grace." --Washington Post From the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams comes this transformative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction. 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, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, as well as brilliant 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 a book 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.

Intoxication and Its Aftermath

The Recovering

From the New York Times bestselling author of THE RECOVERING and THE EMPATHY EXAMS comes “a blazing, unputdownable memoir” (Mary Karr, author of Lit), the “piercing, intimate” story (TIME Magazine) of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.
 
Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—SPLINTERS enters a new realm.
 
In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.
 
How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, SPLINTERS plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page, full of linguistic daring and emotional acuity. Jamison, a master of nonfiction, evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).

Another Kind of Love Story

Splinters

Robert Atwan

"Jamison has done an exceptional job curating this volume, selecting essayists who are diverse in ideas and experiences, and essays that are challenging, passionate, sobering, and clever." --Publishers Weekly "The essay is political--and politically useful, by which I mean humanizing and provocative--because of its commitment to nuance, its explorations of contingency, its spirit of unrest, its glee at overturned assumptions; because of the double helix of awe and distrust--faith and doubt--that structures its DNA," writes guest editor Leslie Jamison in her introduction. From the Iraqi desert to an East Jerusalem refugee camp, from the beginnings of the universeto the aftermath of a suicide attempt, the genetic makeup of the eclectic and electric selections inThe Best American Essays 2017 "thrill toward complexity." The Best American Essays 2017 includes RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH, LAWRENCE JACKSON, RACHEL KUSHNER, ALAN LIGHTMAN, BERNARD FARAI MATAMBO, WESLEY MORRIS, HEATHER SELLERS, ANDREA STUART and others

The Best American Essays 2017

a novel

The gin closet

From a bold, sensitive, and shrewd young writer: a hotly anticipated debut novel, about flesh, fear, poverty, privilege, and the sheer and inescapable brutality of love. In the beginning, there was Tilly: fabulous and free, outrageous and untamable, vulnerable and terrified. Was it the Sixties that did her wrong, or the drugs, or the men, or was it the middle-class upbringing she couldn't abide? As a young woman, she flees home for the hollow neon underworld of Nevada, looking for pure souls and finding nothing but bad habits. She stays away for decades, working the streets and worse, eventually drinking herself to the brink of death in the middle of the desert. One day, after Tilly has spent nearly thirty years without a family, her niece shows up on the doorstep of her dusty trailer. Stella has been leading her own life of empty promise in New York City. She makes her living booking Botox appointments and national-media appearances for a famous (and famously neurotic) "inspirational" writer by day; she complains about her job at warehouse parties in remote boroughs by night; she waits for her married lover to make time in his schedule to screw her over, softly; and she takes care of her ailing grandmother in Connecticut. Before Stella's grandmother dies, she tells Stella the truth about Tilly, her runaway daughter, and Stella decides to give up the vast and penetrating loneliness of the city to find this lost woman the family had never mentioned. The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between Tilly and Stella as they move to San Francisco to make a home with Abe, Tilly's overworked and elusive son. Shifting between the perspectives of both women, the narrative documents the construction of a fragile triangle that eventually breaks under its own weight. With an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love, and power, Leslie Jamison reminds us that no matter how unexpected its turns are, this life we're given is all we have: the cruelties that unhinge us, the beauties that clarify us, the addictions that deform us, those fleeting possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. In the words of writer Charles D'Ambrosio, this extraordinary novel teaches us that "history has its way, the body has its way, and the rebellions we believe in leave behind a bleak wisdom, if we're lucky -- and defeat, if we're not." The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.

The Gin Closet

From the New York Times bestselling author of THE RECOVERING and THE EMPATHY EXAMS comes “a blazing, unputdownable memoir” (Mary Karr, author of Lit), the “piercing, intimate” story (TIME Magazine) of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love. Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—SPLINTERS enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another. How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, SPLINTERS plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page, full of linguistic daring and emotional acuity. Jamison, a master of nonfiction, evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).

Rebecca Godfrey

Peggy

Coleen Marlo

Empathy Exams, The

Leslie Jamison realiza uma investigação poética, dolorosa e incisiva sobre violência, sexo, doença, autoestima e capacidade de expressão . Com enfoque feminista, um dos ensaios se propõe a desbancar o que se costuma estereotipar como “dor feminina” Aclamada pela crítica por seus ensaios considerados viscerais e autênticos, publicados em revistas como Harper’s e Oxford American, a escritora americana Leslie Jamison reúne pela primeira vez em livro seus melhores trabalhos como ensaísta. E é a preocupação com a dor o ponto de partida de suas análises, nas quais propõe uma investigação intrigante sobre o significado da palavra empatia. Baseando-se em suas próprias experiências, como um aborto e algumas cirurgias, uma no coração e outra no maxilar, a autora confronta não só a dor física, mas disseca os possíveis sentimentos que dali afloram tanto mais quanto se aproxima da ferida. Jamison assinou um único romance, The Gin Closet, que ficou entre os finalistas do Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize, e é colunista regular do New York Times Book Review. Os textos de Exames de Empatia revelam também histórias reais contadas a ela por desconhecidos, sobre as quais ela filosofa: “Empatia significa perceber que nenhum trauma tem bordas discretas. Trauma sangra. Também significa a porosidade no testemunho, a vontade de deixar os problemas de um estranho se infiltrar e lentamente desfraldar seu significado”.

Exames de Empatia

A powerful yet refreshing essay collection centred around themes of confession, illness, violence and sentimentality from an exciting new American talent.

A strong and revealing essay that represents a literary milestone, putting Leslie Jamison on the same level as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. The author writes about her own experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose; from here she begins describing her experiences with pain.

El Anzuelo Del Diablo

Rita Da Costa

La adicción y sus repercusiones

La huella de los días

Über Einfühlung und das Leiden anderer

Die Empathie-Tests

52 Blue

Esami di empatia. Saggi sulle sofferenze degli altri

Alle Geschichten von Sucht gleichen einander, doch jeder Süchtige glaubt, auf ganz eigene Weise unglücklich zu sein. Das begriff Leslie Jamison, als sie begann, Treffen der Anonymen Alkoholiker zu besuchen: Sie trank, weil sie ihre Mängel verbergen und um jeden Preis besonders sein wollte. Sie würde erst genesen, wenn sie nicht mehr auf ihrer Originalität beharrte. Mitreißend erzählt sie von ihrer Abhängigkeit und hält sie gegen die populären Mythen trunkener Genialität – über Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, David Foster Wallace und viele andere. „Die Klarheit“ ist eine persönliche und kollektive Geschichte des Trinkens und des nüchternen Lebens – klug, bewegend aufrichtig und von unverhoffter Schönheit.

Leslie Jamison

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