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A review by geoffdgeorge
The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison
Some really powerful, valuable ideas in this one. Was jiving 100 percent with the title essay's exploration of empathy as something that takes work and will rather than being inherently possessed. Also enjoyed the pieces on Morgellons sufferers, the ultra-runners of the Barkley Marathons, and the West Memphis Three.
I'm seeing a lot of other reviews on here ding the author for inserting herself too much into these essays, but the practice didn't feel intrusive to me. If anything, her weaving of the personal with what she was seeing and trying to relate to outside of herself seemed to be a key part of the whole project.
Jamison mentions her time at the Iowa Writer's Workshop quite a bit, which gave me the feeling that she worked on a lot of these pieces during or not long after her time there. Certain passages have a heavier academic air about them, to such an extent that it did sometimes halt my momentum as a reader (thinking of passages like this: "Wound implies en media res: the cause of injury is past but the healing isn't done; we are seeing this situation in the present tense of its immediate aftermath"). I have Make It Scream, Make It Burn sitting on my shelf, waiting, and I'll be curious, when I get to it, to see how/whether her style has changed with more distance from the writing program. (Though I see on Wikipedia that she jumped from the IWW to a PhD in English Lit at Yale, so ...)
I'm seeing a lot of other reviews on here ding the author for inserting herself too much into these essays, but the practice didn't feel intrusive to me. If anything, her weaving of the personal with what she was seeing and trying to relate to outside of herself seemed to be a key part of the whole project.
Jamison mentions her time at the Iowa Writer's Workshop quite a bit, which gave me the feeling that she worked on a lot of these pieces during or not long after her time there. Certain passages have a heavier academic air about them, to such an extent that it did sometimes halt my momentum as a reader (thinking of passages like this: "Wound implies en media res: the cause of injury is past but the healing isn't done; we are seeing this situation in the present tense of its immediate aftermath"). I have Make It Scream, Make It Burn sitting on my shelf, waiting, and I'll be curious, when I get to it, to see how/whether her style has changed with more distance from the writing program. (Though I see on Wikipedia that she jumped from the IWW to a PhD in English Lit at Yale, so ...)