Leslie Jamison writes essays and memoir about pain, addiction, empathy, illness and the complicated ethics of turning experience into narrative. The Empathy Exams begins with her work as a medical actor performing symptoms for trainee doctors and expands into essays on injury, imprisonment, endurance events and other situations where one person tries to understand another’s suffering. The Recovering combines memoir of alcoholism with literary history, asking how addiction stories can avoid both romanticising damage and flattening recovery into a simple moral arc. Make It Scream, Make It Burn moves through travel, photography, obsession and reported encounters, while Splinters examines motherhood, divorce and rebuilding a life. Jamison’s prose is analytical and self-questioning, often exposing the limits of her own interpretation. The Empathy Exams is the strongest introduction to Jamison’s essay style, while The Recovering gives her self-questioning method a sustained subject in addiction, literary mythology and the language of recovery. Read more Less
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