The Empathy Exams (Essays)

We all carry emotional burdens and scars. What does it mean to identify with and acknowledge that pain in others? Is it like being a tourist in a foreign land, with aspects of immersion and voyeurism? In The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison tackles these questions and more through essays that

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chronicle her encounters with people dealing with physical or emotional pain, as well as her engagements with larger cultural traumas and their constructs.

The essay as a literary form is underrated, and I really wanted to love this collection. By its very nature, the essay is grounded in the personal, which can make for evocative writing in the right hands. But Jamison's collection veers into self-obsession in too many places, and what is strutted out as deep analysis comes off as nothing more than sound and fury. The writing in The Empathy Exams isn't consistent and some essays careen into a hodgepodge of digressions and confessions. I'm fine with Jamison revealing her guilt and anxieties—it's a book of essays about empathy after all—but Jamison lays it on thick.

What I hoped to find in this much-hyped collection was intellectual honesty and emotional truth. What I got was something of a mixed bag. Jamison's writing is a blend of the journalistic and personal, with a heavy-hand on the personal. She seeks to understand—so I think the intellectual honesty is there—but her earnestness feels strained, like a singer hitting high notes she has no business hitting. In fact, I cringed every time Jamison tries to paint experiences, which are obviously grounded in realities far removed from her own, with poetic, hazy brushstrokes to make them her own. Ugh. Like a form of appropriation. The sad irony: This kind of writing actually screams a lack of empathy.

In the title essay, one of the better ones, Jamison tells of a time she worked as a medical actor portraying 'patient profiles' for doctors in training. She alternates fictional case profiles with profiles of herself and recalls the time she got an abortion and the emotional fallout from that. It's poignant. In "Devil's Bait" Jamison examines Morgellons disease, a mysterious condition that has baffled the medical establishment and has become a catchall for people who develop skin ailments like lesions and growths that can't be explained. Jamison enters the tight-knit community of Morgellons sufferers and documents her conversations with them. It's a look at the pain and shared bonds of their collective hysteria. By far, this foray into medical anthropology was my favorite.

In "The Immortal Horizon" Jamison meets a group of wilderness ultra-marathon runners and explores their drive to push their physical and mental limits. Jamison is piercingly insightful here. She notes how one runner describes his motivation for participating in the Barkley races:

"He wants to achieve a completely insular system of accountability, one that doesn't depend on external feedback. He wants to run a hundred miles when no one knows he's running, so that the desire to impress people, or the shame of quitting, won't constitute his sources of motivation. … When it's midnight and it's raining and you're on the steepest hill you've ever climbed and you're bleeding from briars and you're alone and you've been alone for hours, it's only you around to witness yourself quit or continue."

In that single epiphany, Jamison zooms in on the irony of reaching that physical nirvana from a state of isolation. It's empathy and anti-empathy juxtaposed together. In the concluding essay, "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain," Jamison goes full feminist tilt and delves into how women and their pain have been depicted in literature and popular culture. Very smart writing here.

Unfortunately there are also essays that fall flat. These, I noticed, are the ones that chronicle her experiences abroad. One describes her meeting with the Mexican literati and considers the violence inflicted by the drug cartels and how the trauma of that has been channeled through art and poetry. Another discusses an assault Jamison experienced while teaching in Nicaragua. The writing gets thin here.

Overall, The Empathy Exams is just more style than substance for me. Sometimes I wished she focused more on the reporting in her essays; when she does her writing is illuminating. It shouldn't be about doing your utmost to analyze and understand and filter, but doing more to listen to others and the world around you. That's true empathy.

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The contents of this book are remarkably difficult to describe. Well, all right, no, it's easy enough to describe: it's a series of personal essays all of which, in some manner, deal with the subjects of human suffering and human empathy. But I'm not sure saying that gives you a good idea of what

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to expect at all. Partly that's because the specifics of the subject matter are so varied. The author talks about her personal experiences, including having an abortion and being punched in the nose during a mugging. She tours places dense with misery and observes not just her surroundings, but her own reactions. She describes a job she had pretending to be a patient for doctors in training and rating them, in part, on how much empathy they displayed, and then talks about attending a conference for people who are certain they are suffering from a disease doctors don't believe actually exists. And so on.

Some of these essays struck me as better than others, but at they're best they're amazing: lyrically written and insightful in a way that sometimes made me want to gasp. And if sometimes it borders on the self-indulgent, well, that in itself just provides more to talk about, as Jamison thoughtfully considers what it means for her to write about her own pain or her perceptions of others' pain, and widens that self-reflection out to consider complex questions about not just empathy, but about what we mean when we accuse someone of wallowing in their own pain and in what contexts we make those kinds of judgments. And for all that she talks about herself a lot, there seems to me to be a laudable kind of humility in her willingness to constantly re-examine and question her own feelings and her own responses. The result isn't always easy to read, but I found it very much worth it.

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I dunno, such acclaim for this book of essays but I didn't enjoy it. Yes, it is well-written; yes, there are interesting situations, but no, I just could not feel much empathy with the author who made so many wrong choices, so I guess I flunked!

I did find two great quotes: "This is how writers fall

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in love; they feel complicated together and then they talk about it."

and this, from an interview with the author:

"There's a part of me that has always felt more comfortable arguing in writing than in person because I get to control all the puppets. I get the satisfaction of argument because I can always lift or project voices of disagreement, and I also get to construct and control the entire theatre in which that disagreement is happening."

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I'd read about this book and was excited to see it on the bestseller shelf, just waiting for me! Jamison does an incredible job exploring empathy with depth. Much more than addressing empathy in what we'd think of as traditionally potentially empathic situations (a hospital or with a friend,

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perhaps), Jamison digs deep to explore opportunities for empathy in challenging situations as well as hindrances to empathy. There is a lot to think about here. Well done.

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The basics: The Empathy Exams is an essay collection. Each essay, including the titular one, addresses empathy, although some focus more on it than others.

My thoughts: I've really been enjoying essays lately, and The Empathy Exams is the most buzzed about collection this year. Having read several

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edited collections, it was delightful to dig more deeply into a thematic collection of essays by a single author.

The first (and titular) essay is astonishingly good. It details Jamison's time working as a medical actor, where her job was to act out symptoms for medical students, who were then judged not only on their diagnostic skills, but also their empathy, both verbally and visually. The essay is simultaneously a fascinating glimpse into an experience and a deep meditation on health, wellness, humanity, and empathy.

As I read this collection, which I didn't expect to be about empathy after the first essay, I realized how much I'm drawn to essays about personal experiences. Given this revelation, it's not surprising I was most drawn to Jamison's essays about her immersive experiences. Many of them are journalistic at times, but Jamison pushes so much further. She uses these experiences as a stepping off point for deeper discussions.

Favorite passage: "This was the double blade of how I felt about anything that hurt: I wanted someone else to feel it with me, and also I wanted it entirely for myself."

The verdict: In a collection exploring both a singular theme and a variety of experiences and emotions, some essays in The Empathy Exams inevitably excel more than others. Judging them against one another seems almost unfair, however, as the collection is so strong. As the collection winds down, I found myself giving some of the later essays more of a 'meh' response because my expectations became so high as I read. Yet had I read them individually, I would have been wowed. Ultimately, The Empathy Exams is a strong, dynamic collection of essays, and the multiple-page Google doc of memorable quotes is one I'll keep returning to.

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Received as part of Indiespensable subscription. I never would had read this book, otherwise. I am very glad I did, never having really thought about the possibilities of guilt and pain laid bare here.

Read really good reviews of this book but I can't say I agree with them. I'm not a fan of essays, generally: I find the intellectual style puts up barriers between author and reader - and so this style was an odd choice for a book purportedly about empathy!

I see that other reviewers noted the

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personal style. Yes, true, but the jumbled up style: personal disclosure mixed up with journalism and research results just didn't work for me.

The best chapter was the first, which shares the title of the book. I too was a standardized patient, and so I was quite interested to read about Jamison's experience. But even here, the most personal of all the chapters, I found the style disjointed, skipping between the SP encounters and her own personal experience. Oddly, this too felt like a distancing mechanism.

All in all, quite disappointing.

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This collection begins with the title essay, which describes Leslie Jamison's experience as a medical actor. As she acts the part of a patient, she experiences the empathy or lack thereof displayed to her by medical students. She weaves this experience toward with her experience as a patient

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getting an abortion. The essay reads like story. It is put together well, evoking empathy from its readers. But its real strength is in the insights that Jamison pulls from her experiences. These insights often jolted me out of the narrative, but this was not a bad thing. Instead, it made me an active participant in these essays, considering my own experiences of empathy. It's almost impossible to describe these insights without a few examples:

"Empathy means realizes that no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries."

"Dave doesn't believe in feeling bad just because someone else does. . . He thinks imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it."

"This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones."

Jamison moves on to other topics - extreme races, incarceration, undiagnosed illnesses, poverty - using each as an opportunity to probe deeper into the experience of empathy. The insights remain true to the context from which they arise, but also layer together to provide a study of empathy that I felt as though I barely grasped on my first read of this collection. This is a book that will definitely need to be re-read.

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I had a hard time getting through this collection. I found her writing style difficult to follow, and the ideas that she explored in her essays were at many times lost on me. Maybe I didn't enjoy these essays because it was not easy for me to identify with the author and her experiences. There was

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a disconnect, I felt, between reader and writer. The one essay I did enjoy was her last essay titled, "The Grand Unified Theory on Female Pain." In this essay she talked less about her experiences, and more about ideas and society around her. Overall I was disappointed considering it got such high praise.

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While some essays were very interesting and delved into the many aspects of empathy, the rest were a struggle to read. I found myself skimming and even skipping paragraphs just to get through them. I was disappointed to find such contrast within the same book. I you feel you must read this one, due

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to all the praise it has received, get it from the library, don't waste your money.

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I need to think more about this and How Should a Person Be before trying to write about them - I'm too busy being on holidays to figure out how to say why I liked one so much and found the other problematic.

An uneven collection, some essays seem extemporaneous and insufficiently honed. There are points where the author's interrogation of her own guilt/shame/self-obsession overwhelm her subjects (judged as journalism, many of these pieces fail). Despite relentless dissection, sometimes her internal

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battles don't bear fruit; rather than reveal interesting questions or insights, we're only left with the insularity or banality of her personal experience.

While a reader might prefer an invisible narrator, the author can't help but insert herself as a character in every story she encounters. The problem at the center of this book is that she can't help but do so; that for her this is a prerequisite for empathy: not just sympathizing with the pain of others, but imagining possessing the pain herself. The battle between her complicated neediness (as accurately criticized by her lovers) and her desire to be present for others can be hard to watch, and one wonders about her ability to preserve boundaries - how porous is the frontier between an "open heart" and a broken one?

Still - the best pieces are deeply felt, deeply thoughtful, and explore little known extremes (of endurance, of confinement, of belief...) in a way that makes the book very much worth your time.

Jamison almost always avoids cliche, and resists the urge to gloss over or explain away discomfort or uncertainty. She doesn't shy away from sentiment, emotional or moral (after all, these two may be connected).

While not as ruthless or thorough, at times her method reminds me of Knausgaard (in My Struggle) - they both explore their own weaknesses in a way that serves to disarm potential critics (by acknowledging, without quite wallowing in their imperfection), and as a means of universalizing the difficulty and value of engagement with others.

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This is not the kind of book I typically read, nonfiction narrative essays, but then again it is also the kind I find myself reading more and more of lately. Women's autobiography reaching beyond itself, either in terms of form or content. (It is never just about THIS woman, but it is also about

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this woman and her particular strategies of navigating a hostile world...and trust me, it is always a hostile world).

This book is about empathy and the limits of empathy, and so it is also about pain. It asks us to consider the pain of others, to take it seriously. I particularly recommend the first and last essays: The Empathy Exams (about being a medical actor) and "Grand Unified Theory of
Female Pain" (the title pretty much sums it up).

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Unique experiences delivered with insight and excellent storytelling. Sometimes too heavy and difficult to digest, but thought-provoking and intelligent. Looks at empathy from many different angles and through a variety of people.

I hated this book, specifically I hated the tone of its self-important author.

This one didn't do much for me; I found the writing pretty frustrating.

Deep empathy...defies characterization…honest & thought provoking... #Psychology

3.5 stars.

I loved the first half of this book - the essays were wonderfully written and I was sucked in. However, the last few essays, particularly the last two, failed to grab me and hold my attention like the others.

One thing that really impressed me was the way Jamison did not present herself as a perfect master of kindness. Many times in her essays she came across as quite self-absorbed and self-destructive. At first, those qualities turned me off in the same way it annoys me when someone is debating a topic

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and keeps bringing it back to how it impacted them. I thought it was particularly off-putting when she talked about getting punched in the face and pick-pocketed. Compared with the trauma elsewhere in the story others dealt with, that seemed petty to bring up. But she knows it, and uses that discomfort between what she knows (that the pickpocket probably needed the money, that she was lucky to be able to afford plastic surgery) and her real pain. I was also impressed with her defense of female "angst." That's certainly not a popular opinion in today's ironic world, which she addresses.

At the same time, I never felt fully comfortable with the way she used herself in her essays. I think that speaks to the way I interact with "women's pain" in my own life -- "Enough about your breakup!" -- an impatience she explores in her last essay. Still, I preferred the sections on people she had no clear connection with, like the coal miners. I think the essays were perfectly constructed (and made me miss college!) but I think could have expanded beyond her own purview a bit more.

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A truly superlative collection of personal essays.

It’s so easy to call most any collection of essays thought provoking; thus, I’ll call this an extremely thought-provoking collection. On opening the cover of the book, the first thing that struck me was all the glowing comments spread out over eight pages. That’s more than your average

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bear.

”[Jamison] circles around questions without settling for easy answers.” – The Columbus Dispatch

“This book melted my brain and my heart several times….” – Shelf Awareness

“This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best.” – Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries

“Extraordinary and exacting …. It’s not surprising that Jamison is drawing comparisons to Sontag.” Olivia Laing

Sometimes I can truly appreciate how great a work is, but I sometimes feel that I’m not exactly on the right frequency, as there’s a wee bit of static in my reception. To be honest, I most often attribute that static to my brain not being finely tuned—with getting too little sleep being the most common grit in my gears. Another strong possibility for my tuning problem could be my sex, especially when it comes to her powerful essay, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” For as much as I was attuned to the love of my life after thirty years together, there were still thoughts and conclusions that sometimes separated my wife and I along the woman/man divide—again, probably because of some grit.

This collection was published after Jamison most deservedly won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her writing is keen, flexible, and so skilled in how she approaches her essays. She not only reveals her subject matter, but she’s gifted in how she allows her readers to understand them. Obviously, empathy is the over arcing theme of the collection, which alone makes it stand out, and she also allows us to see the humanity that oftentimes is given short shrift in our society.

As a fan of both writers, it feels most apt that people speak of Jamison in the same breath as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Yes, with this book she’s that good. She comes at human suffering from many viewpoints, and always does it with intelligence—sometimes with humor—as she ponders our responsibilities and reactions to it. Her pieces many times take us deep into the philosophical, and at other times she relates to our common reactions to everyday problems.

Jamison is never shy about sharing things personal, it so often helps her powerfully drive her points home. Everyone’s life has some suffering, and while our author may well have experienced more than the average person, she uses that to show her readers all that we share as humans.

I will close with the phrase on a shoulder patch that I wore for many years as a young adult—GIVE A DAMN. Living without empathy is not human. Leslie Jamison has written a powerful and meaningful book here, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.

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Didn't capture me, so I returned it. At this moment in time, I have pretty much no interest in reading journalistic essays from the perspective of a privileged intellectual immersing herself in places where she's an outsider and examining the experience of doing so. I don't think there's anything

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inherently wrong with this exercise, I just feel as if I've read (and experienced) this narrative too many times to learn much from it. I'd rather hear from different voices.

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