The Empathy Exams
Leslie Jamison
[Granta]
The Empathy Exams is a collection of essays about pain. It is a book alert to its own difficulties: conscious that taking pain seriously, defiantly rendering major and minor key hurts, tests the limits of its reader. These limits need to be expanded. For Jamison, our judgments on who gets to have pain, who gets to talk about it – and how – become narrow frontiers of taste and exclusion that “offer our closed hearts too many alibis”. About half of the essays here are confessional, evoking the “terrible, seething garments” Jamison has worn through operations, relationships, adolescence; psychic and physical scarification. Yet this is no insular, self-absorbed blurting. Even the most intimate pieces are exquisitely framed, their contents granted remarkable depths of space and thought. Jamison shifts, rethinks and revises, the knotted complexities of her thought presented through deceptively simple, graceful language.
The non-confessional essays skillfully describe contexts of prison cells, silver mines and narcotic warfare. However, Jamison’s hunt for pain and for empathy can obscure the baffling, unique strangeness of these situations. Each scenario is refracted through her personal pain-feelers; the distinctive hurts of one woman mapped awkwardly, sometimes naïvely, onto wider contexts. Jamison is (painfully) aware of these and other “clean guillotine strokes” by which we may dismiss her approach as privileged or sentimental. To do so would be a mistake. From the stuff of her experience, Jamison has made something weird and rare and special and flawed. Something that plainly asks for, and deserves, our attention.
Words: Gill Moore
