The Empathy Exams: Essays

by Leslie Jamison

  Grealy had been craving the identity-locus of damage even before it happened to her; and was happy, as a little girl, when trauma first arrived: “I was excited by the idea that something really was wrong with me”—like Molly with a razor at her cheek, trying to make herself a Misfit. Years later, Grealy still took a certain comfort in her surgeries. These were the times when she was cared for most directly, and when her pain was given a structure beyond the nebulous petty torture of feeling ugly to the world. “It wasn’t without a certain amount of shame that I took this kind of emotional comfort from surgery,” she writes. “Did it mean I liked having operations and thus that I deserved them?”

  In Grealy’s shame I see the residue of certain cultural imperatives: to be stoic, to have a relationship to pain defined by the single note of resistance. These imperatives make it shameful to feel any attachment to pain or any sensitivity to its offerings. What I love about Grealy is that she’s not afraid to be honest about every part of her pain: how she takes some comfort in her surgeries and feels discomfort at this comfort; how she tries to feel better about her face—over and over again—and just can’t. She can’t make ugliness productive. She can’t make the wound fertile. She can only take solace in how much it hurts, and in how this hurting elicits the care of others. In this confession, of course, the wound does become fertile. It yields honesty. Her book is beautiful.

  As a little girl, Grealy learned to be what she calls “a good patient,” but the book itself refuses this posture: she offers no false resurrections of the spirit. She insists on the tyranny of the body and its damage. Her situation was an extreme one, but it gave form and justification to how I was living then, silently: my own existence defined by injury.

  Most of the negative Amazon reviews of Autobiography of a Face focus on the idea of self-pity: “She was a sad woman who never got beyond her own personal pain,” “I found this book extremely sorrowful and drowning in self-pity,” “it seems like she could only think of herself, her complete misery and pain at being ‘ugly.’”

  A man named “Tom” writes:

  In all of the books I’ve read, I’ve never encountered such terribly [sic] moaning and wallowing in self-pity. I can easily sum up the entire 240-page book in 3 words: Woe is me … In addition to a mess of crying, the author cannot seem to make up her mind on anything. First she says she does not want to be felt sorry for by anyone, then she proceeds to scorn others about their inability to feel an ounce of sympathy.

  The woman Tom describes, “wallowing” in self-pity and unable to decide what the world should do about it, is exactly the woman I grew up afraid of becoming. I knew better—we all, it seems, knew better—than to become one of those women who plays victim, lurks around the sickbed, hands her pain out like a business card. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think this was just me. An entire generation, the next wave, grew up doing everything we could to avoid this identity: we take refuge in self-awareness, self-deprecation, jadedness, sarcasm. The Girl Who Cried Pain: she doesn’t need meds; she needs a sedative.

  And now we find ourselves torn. We don’t want anyone to feel sorry for us, but we miss the sympathy when it doesn’t come. Feeling sorry for ourselves has become a secret crime—a kind of shameful masturbation—that would chase away the sympathy of others if we ever let it show. “Because I had grown up denying myself any feeling that even hinted at self-pity,” Grealy writes, “I now had to find a way to reshape it.”

  Reshape it into what? Into faith, sexual promiscuity, intellectual ambition. At the pinnacle: into art. Grealy offers this last alchemy, pain-to-art, as possibility but not redemption. It seems likely that for all her wound has given her—perspective, the grit of survival, an insightful meditation on beauty—Grealy would still trade back these wound boons for a pretty face. This confession of willingness is her greatest gift of honesty, not arguing that beauty was more important than profundity, just admitting that she might have chosen it—that beauty was more difficult to live without.

  Interlude: Outward

  When I started writing this essay, I decided to crowdsource. I wrote a message to some of my favorite women asking them to tell me about their thoughts on female pain. “Please don’t not-respond,” I wrote; “it would make me feel totally alone in my obsession with gendered woundedness.” They responded.

  “Perhaps too obvious,” wrote a friend in divinity school, “but the fall?” She pointed out that Eve is defined by the pain of childbirth. Another friend suggested that perhaps childbirth shapes women as a horizon of anticipation. Women come into consciousness, she speculated, imagining a future pain toward which their bodies inevitably propel them.

  A friend described an upbringing “thoroughly, thoroughly obsessed with not being a victim.” She typed not being a victim in italics. Another friend described her young devotion to the oeuvre of Lurlene McDaniel, an author who writes about sick girls—cancer-ridden, heart-transplanted, bulimic—who make friends with even sicker girls, girls turned angelic by illness, and always eventually watch these sicker girls die. These books offered an opportunity for two-pronged empathy—the chance to identify with martyr and survivor, to die and live at once, to feel simultaneously the glory of tragedy and the reassurance of continuance.

  I got confessions. One friend admitted that female pain often felt, to her, like “a failure of an ethic of care,” and that her ideal of feminine pain might be the grieving Madonna: “the pain of care whose object of care has been removed.” She was afraid this ideal made her a secret misogynist. Another friend—Taryn, a poet—confessed that her greatest fear was that her poems would come across as solipsistic transcriptions of private suffering, and that in this self-concern they would also register as somehow “feminine.” She too was afraid that this first fear made her a secret misogynist.

  One friend got so worked up by my e-mail that she waited until the next morning to reply. She was tired of an abiding societal fascination, she wrote, with women who identified themselves by their pain—women who hurt themselves, or got too drunk, or slept with the wrong men. She was more than tired of. She was angry.

  I think her anger is asking a question, and I think that question demands an answer. How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative? Fetishize: to be excessively or irrationally devoted to. Here is the danger of wounded womanhood: that its invocation will corroborate a pain cult that keeps legitimating, almost legislating, more of itself.

  The hard part is that underneath this obscene fascination with women who hurt themselves and have bad sex and drink too much, there are actual women who hurt themselves and have bad sex and drink too much. Female pain is prior to its representation, even if its manifestations are shaped and bent by cultural models.

  Relying too much on the image of the wounded woman is reductive, but so is rejecting it—being unwilling to look at the varieties of need and suffering that yield it. We don’t want to be wounds (“No, you’re the wound!”) but we should be allowed to have them, to speak about having them, to be something more than just another girl who has one. We should be able to do these things without failing the feminism of our mothers, and we should be able to represent women who hurt without walking backward into a voyeuristic rehashing of the old cultural models: another emo cutter under the bleachers, another hurt-seeking missile of womanhood, a body gone drunk or bruised or barren, another archetype sunk into blackout under the sheets.

  We’ve got a Janus-faced relationship to female pain. We’re attracted to it and revolted by it; proud and ashamed of it. So we’ve developed a post-wounded voice, a stance of numbness or crutch of sarcasm that implies pain without claiming it, that seems to stave off certain accusations it can see on the horizon: melodrama, triviality, wallowing—an ethical and aesthetic commandment: Don’t valorize suffering women.

  You court a certain disdain by choosing to write about hurting women. You get your period with sharks aro
und—exposed column of nerve and blood—but everyone thinks it’s a stupid show. You want to cry, I am not a melodramatic person! But everyone thinks you are. You’re willing to bleed but it looks, instead, like you’re trying to get bloody. When you bleed like that—all over everything, tempting the sharks—you get told you’re corroborating the wrong mythology. You should be ashamed of yourself. Plug it up.

  In 1844, a woman named Harriet Martineau wrote a book called Life in the Sick Room. Ten years later, she published an autobiography. In this second book, she compresses her illness to a footnote, explaining: “There is no point of which I am more sure than it is unwise in sick people to keep a diary.” She knew better than to yoke her identity as an author to her status as a sick woman, especially in a culture eager to see women as invalids-in-waiting. Perhaps she was justifiably afraid that her sickness would be understood as limiting the scope of her vision, that it might quarantine her into category. A major poet with a minor range: The Passion of the Invalid.

  Lucy Grealy learned to be a good patient when she learned that it was possible to fail at being sick. “My feelings of shame and guilt for failing not to suffer,” she writes, “became more unbearable. The physical pain seemed almost easy in comparison.” Sometimes we call failing not to suffer something else: we call it wallowing. Wallow, intr. v.: to roll the body about indolently or clumsily, as if in snow, water, or mud; to luxuriate, to revel. This is the fear: that we will turn our bodies clumsy if we spend too much time mourning what has happened to them; if we revel in our pain like a shark-infested sea; if we wear the mud like paint across our skin-stripped bodies.

  Wound #13

  When Misfit Molly was twenty-four, a stranger broke into her Brooklyn apartment and tried to rape her at knifepoint. She was able to get away—fleeing her studio naked, after a ten-minute struggle—but of course that didn’t release her from years of fear, years of trying to make sense of what had happened. “Imposing a truly sensible narrative on my attack,” she writes, “proved impossible in its aftermath.” She moved in with a good friend, and they watched films to help them fall asleep at night:

  We turned to what we wanted to watch, and that happened, reflexively, to be stories about women in peril, women without autonomy, girls who disappear, dark ladies hurting within and without. On the subway, I found myself obsessively listening to old-time murder ballads like “Pretty Polly,” fascinated by the perverse beauty of lyrics like “He stabbed her through the heart and her heart’s blood did flow.”

  Dark ladies hurting within and without. It doesn’t surprise me that Molly was drawn to them. Maybe they gave her visions of pain worse than her own, or made her feel less alone, or simply granted her permission to inhabit her own pain by offering a world in which the logic of pain held court.

  This essay isn’t fighting for that world. It isn’t simply criticizing the post-wounded voice, or dismissing the ways in which female pain gets dismissed. I do believe there is nothing shameful about being in pain, and I do mean for this essay to be a manifesto against the accusation of wallowing. But the essay isn’t a double negative, a dismissal of dismissal, so much as a search for possibility—the possibility of representing female suffering without reifying its mythos. Lucy Grealy describes much of her artistic life as an attempt “to grant myself the complicated and necessary right to suffer.”

  I’m looking for the thirteenth nude, who arrives at the close of Carson’s poem:

  Very much like Nude #1.

  And yet utterly different.

  …

  I saw it was a human body

  trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones.

  And there was no pain.

  The wind

  was cleansing the bones.

  They stood forth silver and necessary.

  It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all.

  It walked out of the light.

  This Nude is like the first Nude because she is nothing but ragged flesh, but here the “flesh [is] blowing off” and her nakedness signals strength. Her exposure is clean and necessary. There is no pain. The nerves are gone. The move away from pain requires a movement into commonality: “out of the light” of human particularity and gender (“It was not my body, not a woman’s body”) and into the Universal (“it was the body of us all”). Walking out of the light simultaneously suggests being constituted by this light—walking forth from the substance of origin—and leaving it behind, abandoning the state of visible representation. Once pain is cleansed into something silver and necessary, it no longer needs to be illuminated. Pain only reaches beyond itself when its damage shifts from private to public, from solipsistic to collective.

  One friend sent me a letter about pain, written on a piece of nearly translucent paper. She suggested we could see our wounds as “places of conductivity where the pain hits your experience and lights something up.” Her translucent paper mattered. I could see the world beyond her words: the table, my own fingers. Perhaps this visibility—this invitation to see parts in relation—is what pain makes possible.

  We shouldn’t forget how this thirteenth Nude recalls the first one, that primal artifact of pain, whose bloody ghost limns these silver bones like an aura, reminding us that the cleansing cannot happen without some loss: cleaned out the rot, left me mouthfull of love. Like Stevens and his thirteen blackbirds, we see pain from every angle; no single posture of suffering is allowed any measure of perceptual tyranny. We can’t see suffering one way; we have to look at it from thirteen directions and that is only the beginning—then we are called to follow this figure striding out of the light.

  We follow this figure into contradiction, into a confession that wounds are desired and despised; that they grant power and come at a price; that suffering yields virtue and selfishness; that victimhood is a mix of situation and agency; that pain is the object of representation and also its product; that culture transcribes genuine suffering while naturalizing its symptoms. We follow this thirteenth nude back to the bleachers, where some girl is putting on a Passion Play with her razor. We should watch. She’s hurting, but that doesn’t mean she’ll hurt forever—or that hurt is the only identity she can own. There is a way of representing female consciousness that can witness pain but also witness a larger self around that pain—a self who grows larger than its scars without disowning them, who is neither wound-dwelling nor jaded, who is actually healing.

  We can watch what happens when the girl under the bleachers puts down the blade. Suffering is interesting but so is getting better. The aftermath of wounds—the strain and struggle of stitching the skin, the stride of silver bones—contours women alongside the wounds themselves. Glück dreams of “a harp, its string cutting / deep into my palm. In the dream, / it both makes the wound and seals the wound.”

  When I read Taryn’s poems, I see imagination twining like a vine out of injury. You can see bits of her life—a major surgery to remove a tumor wrapped around her liver—but the prone body of her female subject (“she is laid out supplicant”) is never the only body in view. This female voice is never allowed any monopoly on hurt. The poems are thick with damage—a gardener’s birds with their thin bones snapped, a dead fat doe (“Her delicious odor!”)—and butchering instructions: “Spread the ribs with a stick … accordion of bone glows beneath. Reveal the leg meat. This is like opening a set of French doors.” These verbs are verbs of opening, slicing, parting, exploring, excavating, and extracting. Damage isn’t for its own sake. It’s for epistemology or else it’s for dinner. Sometimes you’re nothing but meat, girl. Where others might navel-gaze, Taryn is opening the navels of animals—not my body, not a woman’s body—but her gaze feels personal in its vulnerability. She offers a sense of the violence intrinsic to the feat of living in a body—any body, among other bodies—an awareness necessarily embedded in the body of us all, that body made of light and departing from it.

  I want to honor what happens when con
fession collides with butchering instructions: how we find an admission of wounds but also a vision of manipulating bloody bodies, arranging and opening their parts. I want to insist that female pain is still news. It’s always news. We’ve never already heard it.

  It’s news when a girl loses her virginity or gets an ache in the rag and bone shop of her heart. It’s news when she starts getting her period or when she does something to make herself stop. It’s news if a woman feels terrible about herself in the world—anywhere, anytime, ever. It’s news whenever a girl has an abortion because her abortion has never been had before and won’t ever be had again. I’m saying this as someone who’s had an abortion but hasn’t had anyone else’s.

  Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy fucked her and didn’t call. But I don’t believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes. You learn to start seeing.

  I think dismissing female pain as overly familiar or somehow out-of-date—twice-told, thrice-told, 1,001-nights-told—masks deeper accusations: that suffering women are playing victim, going weak, or choosing self-indulgence over bravery. I think dismissing wounds offers a convenient excuse: no need to struggle with the listening or telling anymore. Plug it up. Like somehow our task is to inhabit the jaded aftermath of terminal self-awareness once the story of all pain has already been told.

  For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman, is how de Beauvoir starts one of the most famous books on women ever written. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Sometimes I feel like I’m beating a dead wound. But I say: keep bleeding. Just write toward something beyond blood.