This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it.
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Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison (born ca. 1983) is an American novelist and essayist. Her work has been published in Best New American Voices 2008, A Public Space, and Black Warrior Review. Originally from Los Angeles, she attended Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and undertook a Ph.D. in English literature at Yale. Her father is the economist and global health researcher Dean Jamison. Jamison's first novel, The Gin Closet, was published by Free Press in 2010. It received positive reviews by the San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, and Publishers Weekly. Jamison's second book, The Empathy Exams, an essay collection published by Graywolf Press, debuted in April 2014 at no. 11 on the New York Times bestseller lis
I’ve always treasured empathy as the particular privilege of the invisible, the observers who are shy precisely because they sense so much—because it is overwhelming to say even a single word when you’re sensitive to every last flicker of nuance in the room.
No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.
Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.
My job title is medical actor, which means I play sick.
Part of the fear of looking at the relationship between art and its financial context, perhaps, is the fear that something else is true as well: I am whatever these worlds paid me to be.
What if we stopped thinking of money as the dirty secret of creative pursuit and instead recognized money as one of its constituent threads? Whether we like it or not, money's presence in art doesn't depend on whether we consider its presence. It's always already there anyway.
I felt something else: initiated, aglow. The whole world stood accused: You never told me it felt this good.
I was afraid that loving the drunk story best meant some part of me still wanted to keep living it. And of course, some part of me did.
I mashed the lime in my vodka tonic and glimpsed — in the sweet spot between two drinks and three, then three and four, then four and five — my life as something illuminated from the inside.
It was liberating to start imagining that there could be meaningful stories told about wreckage, sure, but also meaningful stories told about what it might mean to pull yourself out from under it: stories about showing up for work, for intimacy, for other people; stories about getting through…
We were giddy from the sense of trespass.
The lie wasn't that addiction could yield truth. The lie was that addiction had a monopoly on it.
This ruptured syllogism — If I understand myself, I’ll get better — made me question the way I’d come to worship self-awareness itself, a brand of secular humanism: Know thyself, and act accordingly. What if you reversed this? Act, and know thyself differently. Showing up for a meeting, for a…
Years later, recovery turned this notion upside-down — it made me start to believe that I could do things until I believed in them, that intentionality was just as authentic as unwilled desire. Action could coax belief rather than testifying to it. 'I used to think you had to believe to pray,' David…