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

Grace McCarter

This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It’s a quick fix of empathy. We can take it like a shot of tequila, or a bump of coke from the key to a stranger’s home. We want the inebriation of presence to dissolve the fact of difference. 

It's Othello’s Desdemona Problem: fearing the worst is worse than knowing the worst. So you eventually start wanting the worst possible thing to happen—finding your wife in bed with another man, or watching the worm finally come into the light. Until the worst happens, it always 

 happen. When it actually does happen? Now, at least, you know. 

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? Adam Smith confesses in his 

: "When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm." 

We care about ourselves. Of course we do. Maybe some good comes from it. If I imagine myself fiercely into my brother's pain, I get some sense, perhaps, of what he might want or need, because I think,

. But it also seems like a fragile pretext, turning his misfortunes into an opportunity to indulge pet fears of my own devising.

not arguing that beauty was more important than profundity, just admitting that she might have chosen it - that beauty was more difficult to live without.

because I want them to be innocent, I need them to be saints

Drew and Cat so full of goodness, their nerves so awake to this world, explaining it so patiently, inhabiting with utter grace their small fraction of a torn territory.

Solomon paraphrases Tanner's argument that "sentimental people indulge their feelings instead of doing what should be done" and cites the example of Nazi commander Rudolf Hoess, who wept at an opera staged by concentration camp prisoners.

Your refrigerated bus crosses the concrete spine of the LA River, icon and encapsulation of the city's wasteland shame.

Your friend tells him you grew up here, in Santa Monica, and you feel ashamed because you know Santa Monica isn't here at all.

You like this kind of tour, where there is such a thing as a stupid question

In his theory of the sublime,  eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke proposes the notion of "negative pain": the idea that a feeling of fear - paired with a sense of safety, and the ability to look away - can produce a feeling of delight. One woman can sit on her couch with a glass of Chardonnay and watch another woman drink away her life.

She still calls him the love of her life. He says, "What's up?" and keeps cooking lunch. 

The insistence upon an external agent of damage implies an imagining of the self as a unified entity, a collection of physical, mental, and spiritual components all serving the good of some Gestalt whole - the being itself. When really, the self - at least, as I've experienced mine - is much more discordant and self-sabotaging, neither fully integrated nor consistently serving its own good.

I found stray bits of hardened skin and weird threads - from bandages or who-knows-what? - and I read them like tea leaves to discern what made me feel so trapped in my own body. 

We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. 

It offered assurance rather than empathy, or maybe assurance was evidence of empathy, insofar as he understood that assurance, not identification, was what I needed most. 

Empathy is a kind of care but it's not the only kind of care, and it's not always enough. I want to think that's what Dr. G was thinking. I needed to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not its echo.

I had an insecurity that didn't know how to express itself; that could attach itself to tears or to their absence. 

. When of course the horse wasn't the problem. Dr. M became a villain because my story didn't have one. It was the kind of pain that comes without a perpetrator.

I would tell her that commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Which is to say: that kitchen held the ghosts of countless days that felt easier than the one we were living now.

I felt the weight of expectation on every moment - the sense that the end of this pregnancy was something I 

 feel sad about, the lurking fear that I never felt sad about what I was supposed to feel sad about, the knowledge that I'd gone through several funerals dry eyed, the hunch that I had a parched interior life activated only by the need for constant affirmation, nothing more.

The author described a pulsing fist of fear and loneliness inside her - a fist she'd carried her whole life, had numbed with drinking and sex - and explained how her pregnancy had replaced this fist with the tiny bud of her fetus, a moving life

This was the double blade of how I felt about anything that hurt: I wanted someone else to feel it with me, and I also wanted it entirely for myself

It's not enough for someone to have a sympathetic manner or use a caring tone. The students have to say the right words to get credit for compassion. 

Amy Thibodeau

Mixed feelings. There's some great stuff in here but in spots I think the language is too academic to be entirely successful. Also, the narrator's voice reminded me of a woman I used to know who drove me crazy. If someone had an earache, she'd talk about how her ear almost fell off. If someone twisted an ankle, she'd talk about how once a shark nearly tore off her leg. This book and this woman can sometimes feel like they're one-upping the world on who owns the most pain. 

It can be hard going.

Angel Martinez

Empathy is a tired topic. An elementary religion class lecture turned into a pandemic-era buzzword. You'd think that we've collectively said everything that could possibly be said about it. But Leslie Jamison offers 11 more lenses through which we can examine the term: tackling subjects that are unexpected as they are diverse in range, in ways that are equally incisive, attentive, and full of heart. It's the rare essay collection where every word is intentional, where not a single story goes to waste, and where I feel like I'm emerging from the experience with a commitment to becoming a better person and a more thoughtful writer. (Like the author, I, too, come to the defense of cliches!) This is definitely a new all-time favorite that I recommend to everyone who can see and read and feel.

Francis Buggey

I wasn't really a fan of the book honestly. I get what Jamison was conveying in each of the essays. I felt for the people she wrote about, about the experiences she's had. But maybe since I don't have a problem with empathy, the essays seemed... Boring? The essays she wrote and included didn't shock me or educate me on anything, so maybe that's why I don't get the point of it.

Jade Flynn

“Empathy means realising no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.”

Normally with essay collections there's a mixed bag of hits and misses. Luckily this collection had more hits. 

Some honourable mentions:


  THE EMPATHY EXAMS - 5/5


  GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF FEMALE PAIN - 5/5

 Devil's Bait - 5/5 
 The Immortal Horizon - 4/5 
Lost Boys - 4/5

The Empathy Exams Essays

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