The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison | REVIEW
The Empathy Exams is a series of essays by Leslie Jamison that complicates our understanding of what it means to try to understand other people and ourselves.
My immediate concern when picking up this book was that it was going to be some kind of self-help text. A kind of instruction on how to be kind. But kindness, from what I remember, is a topic that is rarely touched on in this text. The recurring theme throughout is pain. Physical pain. Mental anguish. Bodies imprisoned. Self-loathing. Partial or total disassociation. Second-hand sympathy. Nostalgia and forgetting, and even joy derived from endurance. Pain, and our relationship to it.
While the author is asking the reader to deeply contemplate and apply the ideas in the essays, there isn’t a sense of prescription. This is not a how-to-be-a-better-person book. This is an account of lived experiences, all of them deeply personal. Jamison explores her own interiority and offers candid admissions as to how she relates to all the subjects that she writes about.
The tone of the book varies from essay to essay. Some are very journalistic in nature, while others wax poetic, but wherever they land they fit comfortably in the umbrella of creative nonfiction.
In the essay Immortal Horizons, we trek through the Barkley Marathons along with extreme trail runners, an event that the organizer Lazarus Lake calls, “The Race That Eats Its Young.” It’s a race that you’re almost not supposed to finish. It seems like the task is to push one’s body to its logical extreme and from there try to survive. It exemplifies a rugged individual essentialism that straddles the line of total self-reliance and varying degrees of masochism.
La Frontera follows Jamison’s trip through Mexico and acknowledges the compartmentalized nature of touring through a country and hearing about the workers in the mines, researching about the local cartels and driving by other places of struggles while ending up back at the hotel safe and contained. The book itself is a kind of tourism through the pains of a large cast of people while we safely read, separated by paper and time. And during these tours we can do all the contemplation we want and arrive at conclusions, but how disoriented and conflicted we become when someone breaks our nose and steals our camera and leaves us shocked in blood and fear of disfigurement.
One of the more challenging essays I read was early on in the book called The Devil’s Bait. Jamison reveals to us that she has a condition called Morgellons disease, which isn’t widely known and comes with the baggage of having to constantly convince people it’s real when confided. She recalls going to a convention for people with Morgellons disease. She’s offered sketchy cures, sees herself in the accounts given by other attendees, and holds space for other tellings that she herself can’t fully tell are real or perhaps perceptions. And if she doesn’t believe in the symptoms and diagnoses that are being shared, is she doing the same disservice that has been done to her? “I nod. Nodding offers me a saving vagueness - I can agree with the emotion without promising anything else. The nod can hold agnosticism and sympathy at once.”
One of my brother has a rare disease. There are parts of it that are obvious. Physical concaves in the chest. A 6’7“ boy weighing a hundred twenty pounds. And then there are some aspects that are inaccessible. Pain described without an apparent cause. Some doctors puzzled. Others skeptical. Over the years, the cause has changed from one diagnosis to another. The solution, a surgery, and then later, another do undo that surgery. And while my brother experiences his body constantly betraying him, we, his family are on the outside, unsure of how to best support him. Trying one thing, and then another.
This book is homework in the best way possible. Its confessional tendency gives space for the reader to feel and acknowledge emotions that might have been previously taboo or simply unexamined. The subject matter can often be heavy but Jamison doesn’t make it any heavier than it needs to be. The writing is not sensationalistic for sensation’s sake. Again, it’s an examination. This book will make you feel. And when you’re finished, you’ll surely find something.
