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. 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.
Which brings me to.From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeĪ Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014īeginning 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 should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain-real and imagined, her own and others'-Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. Classes can easily take this book one essay a week, or otherwise just pick and choose whichever essays are most interesting/applicable to the course topic. The fact that THE EMPATHY EXAMS is comprised of essays is what makes it so attractive as a potential Honors Read. What's the worst that can happen? We make our freshmen more empathetic? She's still a BFD (Big Freaking Deal), but I think that our program would be right up her alley. The book has over 11,000 ratings and 1,400 reviews on Goodreads, and with Leslie Jamison currently teaching at the Columbia MFA program, I think she'll be perfectly accessible if the Honors College chooses her book as the 2019-20 read.
The narrator in each story ruminates in some form or another on the idea of human connectivity, on how we can feel or assume or adapt someone else's pain into something that we can ourselves understand.
Leslie Jamison's THE EMPATHY EXAMS is a collection of nonfiction essays published by Graywolf Press in 2014.
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