"this is the kind of essay collection i wish i wrote. jamison's prose is elegiac and visceral as she examines what it means to feel pain—real or imagined, physical or emotional. are human beings even capable of empathy? who knows? 'grand unified theory of female pain' is one of the best pieces of prose i have read all year. it's convoluted and twisting, and i will continue to think about that essay, and this entire collection, for days and weeks and maybe even months to come."
Publisher Graywolf Press
Publication Date 2014-04-01
Section New Titles - Paperback / Essays / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Nathalie B.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781555976712
From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014
Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain―real and imagined, her own and others'―Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory―from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration―in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.
