memoir book

Post #105 – Women’s Memoirs, Book & Video Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler

The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

“I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.”
—Maya Angelou
(International Herald Tribune interview, April 20, 2013)

Leslie Jamison started writing a memoir, but then it mushroomed right out of the genre in her recent book of essays.

Focusing on empathy, she wrings out its very heart and soul, down to the last drop, yet never becomes maudlin. She dissects this concept with the cool detached eye of a biologist disassembling a specimen to observe its internal structure, using events from her own life as well as newsworthy and historical ones that arouse her curiosity. The result for readers is a three-dimensional assessment of responsiveness in situations begging for understanding.

The author plops an occurrence from her life onto the breadboard of her pages, dusts it with a light minimalist description, and then gradually begins pushing it outward with her rolling pin, preparing the yeast to rise and letting the dough expand well beyond the particular happening in her own experience. She asks difficult questions and we are compelled to seek out the answers along with her.

The topics range far and wide and so do the geographic locales. Sometimes Jamison appears in an essay, while in others she doesn’t. Each article is an exam in her quest for the definition and construction of that sympathetic understanding we label as empathy. Central to all the chapters, though, is pain—that of Jamison and that of others. She’s worked as a paid actor for medical students learning to diagnose patients, been the target of street violence in a foreign country, watched a documentary on the West Memphis Three, attended a conference on Morgellons disease, viewed the Barkley Marathons, pondered sentimentality through using saccharin, visited a prisoner at a Federal Correctional Institution, explored the ache of creative people (Frida Kahlo, Joan Didion, and James Agee), and written a “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.”

The Empathy Exams: Essays is Jamison’s first foray into nonfiction as her previous book was The Gin Closet: A Novel. Jamison won the 2011 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, which includes manuscript development and publication, for The Empathy Exams. Because these essays were written separately and have been published previously in different journals or magazines, the reader stumbles across some repeated material. The chapters almost need to be read separately, “as if” certain bits of knowledge have not already been imparted. Could the book be stronger if it were smoothed out and edited into one cohesive book-length essay? Perhaps. That’s a minor quibble though.

The 226-page paperback came out April 1, 2014, and includes a conversation with Jamison that originally appeared in Paris Review Daily.

In some ways, The Empathy Exams makes me think of an excellent book by Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby which came out last August. Solnit also ponders how empathy connects us across a wide-ranging array of topics.

One possible lesson to draw from both books is: Can you move beyond your story when constructing memoir, and place it in a larger context? Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams is a particularly valuable book for writers of memoir—both to read and to study the assembly. Robert Polito, who judged the Graywolf prize, quotes Jamison’s description of her manuscript in his “Judge’s Afterword” on page 226: “The essays in this book were memoir until they couldn’t stand to be memoir anymore.”

That’s a potent thought to mull over.

Note: The Empathy Exams: Essays was published by Graywolf Press.

Lanie Tankard is a freelance writer and editor in Austin, Texas. A member of the National Book Critics Circle and former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews, she has also been an editorial writer for the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville.

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