The Empathy Exams

Essays

By: Leslie Jamison

Narrated by: Leslie Jamison

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection.

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.

Infinitely Giving - And Taking

Just my own personal thing, a painful illness and enough surgeries to make my body look like a map of the U.S., has made me wonder why anyone would ever bring up the topic for any reason.

As someone who does the same thing, I confess to discomfort at double and triple ‘folding inward’ - such as ‘empathy really selfishness which is really…’ - that kind of thing. I think we’re anxious to leave behind no possible meaning or impact or feeling (this just turned into example)…

You discussed what people look for from you. I’m a failed songwriter (no hits - just two ‘garage rock’ songs from the 60s - thought you’d be dying to know). When asked about my desire to write a song that becomes a hit - universally known and loved - a ‘classic,’ I tell them honestly that I could care less about the money. I long for what I feel I never really got from family, friends - and the world: to feel known, understood and accepted. To be loved would be good, too.

I love to read your stuff because I’ve always been obsessed by girls and women, sex and love - summed up by one word: beautiful - and I always learn more about the female experience, perspective, feelings and thought process.

You educate me.

Thanks
Manny Freiser