Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams , on “pain” versus “suffering,” the impulse to travel, and the intrinsic shame of telling our own stories.
Graywolf Press
Leslie Jamison is the author of a novel, The Gin Closet, and has written for publications like The Believer, Harpers, and Oxford American. She is also a Bookends columnist for The New York Times Book Review. Her new book of essays, The Empathy Exams, takes its title from Jamison's work as a medical actor, rating doctors-in-training on their bedside manner, but it also describes the book as an examination of empathy, as a concept and as a practice. The essays take Jamison to a conference for sufferers of Morgellons disease, a brutal ultra-marathon in Tennessee, and the frontier of the narco wars in Mexico, to name just a few; through a series of vignettes called “pain tours”; and into ideological discussions of the merits of sentimentality and pain. The book is an exploration, a travelogue, a manifesto, and a meditation. It is also a quest, for a language of pain and empathy and for a generosity of spirit and understanding. The book is the winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. We spoke on a couch in Brooklyn.
Colleen Kinder
How did you come to realize that the essays you'd been writing fit together as a larger project?
Leslie Jamison: Writing the title essay made me start thinking about these as a collection. It was the first time I'd consciously articulated to myself that empathy was something I was really interested in — the first time I started thinking about everything I could gather around that word.
The piece on Morgellons disease was the first essay I wrote consciously knowing it would be part of a collection. I wrote it without a magazine commission, and I think knowing that it was going to have a home no matter what made it easier to take some logistical risks in writing it (paying for a plane ticket to Austin, for starters), but it also meant that I was battling against a sense of thematic overdetermination. I was so consciously bringing in these questions of empathy: How do I relate to these people's pain? How do I relate even if I disagree with their narrative? I was joking around with a friend that the word “empathy” showed up 39 times in the original draft. In other essays, it was easier to come at empathy through the back door.
In that essay about Morgellons disease, and in others — the one about Charlie, the ultra runner in prison, for example — you showed yourself working not to judge the people you were writing about. In the essay on Morgellons, you write, “All I want to do is look at him in a different way than the doctors did.” I felt like there was this tension between generosity or empathy and factual reporting.
LJ: With the Morgellons piece, I wanted to present the texture of experience as it was lived by these people, rather than a verdict on how we might categorize the experience they were having. There had been many media accounts all focused on the question of “Is the disease real or not?” I wanted to label that as one way you could approach this disease — but not the way that I was approaching it. And with Charlie, his story had been told almost exclusively in terms of the legality of why he was in prison and how he'd gotten there and whether that was justified or not. My perspective involved those questions, but it was bigger than those questions: It was also about his life in prison, the prison industry in West Virginia, the economic landscape around those prisons. I found traction in figuring out how my gaze was going to be different from other gazes; how my questions were different and perhaps less reliant on answers.
Which I guess is one of the differences between writing a piece of journalism and writing an essay — it's not necessarily about coming to an answer about the subject.
LJ: A lot of these essays close with some version of an empty space, or an unknown answer, even a literal question mark — even when I'm processing my own experience. I've often got a strong impulse to leave something ragged at the end. Although I think that tendency can get tiresome when you indulge it too much. Like, “Nothing can be known or resolved or decided” — the bottomless question can be a cheap way to play that — like an existential alibi. But I find myself drawn to what I hope is an earned form of uncertainty.
It's Always Spilling Over The Edges
#MorgellonsDisease, #LeslieJamison
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