This gets old to me: the woman who wants to be sculpted by pain, but also wants to be better than the character type who sculpts herself by pain. Naturally, I judge myself for judging this affect. Which is the point: sometimes empathy doesn’t feel like instinctive sympathy; sometimes it has to push back against a strong sense of impatience or judgment—sometimes those are the feelings that are most intuitive.
Maybe I just came down too hard on people who present potentially loaded things in an affect-neutral way. There are so many reasons people do it. Sometimes it might come off that way when I talk about my own medical history; I’ve just talked about it so many times that it doesn’t have a lot of affective charge anymore. That’s part of what the SP format evokes in the first essay. I think of friends who’ve had really hard things in their lives that make it almost more exhausting for them to go through the whole spectrum of their own emotions every time they open their mouths. It’s not necessarily coming from shame or a passive aggressive plea for sympathy. It’s just a trodden path.
ME: My parents are both physicians, and I’m always conscious of how they tend to quantify both the act of suffering and pain relief. Have you encountered different or competing ways in which other people conceptualize empathy?
LJ: It’s funny how that question resonates, because I think a lot about how my parents’ work relates—in these oblique ways—to what I write about. My dad is an economist who does global development research, and what he practices is a kind of quantifiable empathy. His research is devoted to trying to figure out cost-effective ways to ease global disease burden—and in a way that’s like empathizing with the entire system, figuring out what’s causing the most aggregate suffering and then figuring out how to address that suffering in the most efficient way. The texture of it is so absolutely different from what I do—but the stakes of investment are shared, even if the scales are different. It makes me think about empathy in terms of action more than imaginative identification.
ME: Though sometimes having a very straightforward way to quantify the pain that’s been relieved—the people that have been saved, or the dollars that have been diverted to helping hungry people get food—can threaten to absolve the obligation to think about empathy in more abstract ways.
LJ: Right, yes, though that kind of absolution is perilous in both direction. Sometimes the guilt I feel about being a writer has to do with worrying that I find absolution too quickly—that I believe if I think hard enough and long enough about this stuff, and feel so guilty about it, that I don’t need to do anything anymore. That’s part of why I’m fascinated by James Agee: he was troubled by that question too: I’ve put so much labor in all this guilt, but what does it accomplish in the end?
ME: And do you think that performing your self-reflexivity over and over again can make an essay feel less politically or ethically urgent?
LJ: We’re back to the shame of the confessional. Or confession as obstruction. In inhabiting your own guilt, you’re just undermining the project of documentation by diverting even more attention away from the people you’re writing about. The hardest question I’ve ever gotten at a reading happened in Boise a couple of weeks ago. I read the piece about Agee, and getting hit in Nicaragua, and my memories of Luis and nudging him away so I could get into the door of my house. You get used to a certain range of questions at readings. There’s a certain set of boundaries that they stay inside of—boundaries that I’m not usually aware of because they always stay inside of them. But this one kid in Boise, he must have been 19 or 20, raised his hand and said, “You’ve been talking a lot about empathy tonight—and I’m wondering why you didn’t let that boy into the house.”
It was a wild moment for me. Even if people are aware that the writer is also the character inside her work of nonfiction, they tend to direct their questions to the writer instead of the character. But his question stepped through some membrane that had been invisible to me. It’s like asking, why did you feel like your abortion was okay? I ended up trying to make it explicit—the weirdness and difficulty of the moment—to acknowledge openly that it was a hard question, and to explore why. It brought up all the questions of the essay itself: What good is guilt? What does it mean for me to be a writer sitting here and thinking hard? His question made me remember how electric these tensions are: you can come up with abstract responses or justifications, but there’s still this core heat in you—that “heat”!—and his question pushed the bruise directly.
ME: But that’s the point right? That we’re never going to have totally satisfactory answers to these answers?
LJ: And it goes back to your earlier question about interlocutors. Questioning the efficacy of guilt is also in conversation with some spectral other who’s talking to me as I’m writing that essay—who’s asking me, what good is guilt? So I write the question down to appease or respond to that aggressive force.
ME: The most ungenerous criticism of the collection that I could imagine—and I’m just ventriloquizing here—is, “Oh, she keeps putting herself in these positions to experience pain or woundedness so she can have something to write about and what a privilege that is.” I can see people thinking as they’re reading, “She’s a real glutton for pain.”
LJ: That’s why it felt right to put “Grand Unified Theory” at the end. If the idea of being drawn to pain has emerged as a pattern, the last essay speaks to that directly. What position of pride do I have in relationship to these experiences?
ME: Or sweetness. That’s how I saw the saccharine essay fitting in—that there can be a sweetness in the experience of pain.
LJ: To me there’s an important distinction to draw between chosen and unchosen positions: Going to the Morgellons conference is a choice in a way that getting hit in the face isn’t. Not to say it’s always so neatly divisible. But the collection does choose to bring all of those experiences together, and what kind of appetite is being spoken to there? In certain ways, as a writer, you do profit off your own experiences of pain. There’s an inspirational way to see that profit—turning pain into beauty—and a cynical way to see it—“wound dwelling” in some corrosive or self pitying way. For me, the honest vision dwells somewhere in between.
The original draft of the Morgellons essay was about a hundred pages long, the first draft I wrote after Austin. It was swollen with much more guilt and self-awareness about my own process. I didn’t just narrate the experience of having a parasite, for example, I talked about how I deployed that story in my interviews. Because I did deploy it. I was a little confused about how I was deploying it, but I felt like it offered useful moments of resonance. Like I was trying to tell people, I have been looked at by a doctor in the same way that you have. There was some genuine empathy in that, but it was also instrumental: I think you’ll trust me more if I tell you that I’ve been in some version of that position. That’s another way you reap the profits of a hard experience.
In terms of seeking out certain kinds of experiences, it definitely inflects an experience to have chosen it—or to be inhabiting it with an eye towards its documentation. When you know you’re going to write about something, you bring a weird set of nerve endings to every moment. In Austin, when they started doing the lottery for the microscope, part of me thought, “Oh it would be so embarrassing to win,” and part of me was like, “Oh, but that would be such an amazing moment for the essay.” As I was walking up there to get it, I was already thinking, how will this play out in the story?
ME: I love that moment in the essay. It feels so emblematic of the tension between your position as an observer and a writer, but not a corroborator or participant in the disease. Which brings up another question: Do you show your essays to the people who are in them? What’s that process like?
LJ: It’s different every time, but always fraught. I felt a lot of anxiety about how the Morgellons community would react to that piece. I was giving them visibility, but I knew I wasn’t giving them the kind of visibility they wanted: the fibers are real.
I didn’t feel like I’d made any promises that I was failing to deliver on, but I’m also a pathological pleaser. It’s hard to be a people pleaser and a nonfiction writer. The part of me that wants everyone to love me all the time is very troubled by the idea that I would write something that someone didn’t want to hear. That desire to be loved motivates the writing, and then haunts its execution.
The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison is the 2011 winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Graywolf awards this prize every twelve to eighteen months to a previously unpublished, full-length work of outstanding literary nonfiction by a writer who is not yet established in the genre. Previous winners include The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young, Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays by Eula Biss, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan by Terese Svoboda, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments by Ander Monson, and Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir by Kate Braverman.
The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize seeks to acknowledge—and honor—the great traditions of literary nonfiction, extending from Robert Burton and Thomas Browne in the seventeenth century through Daniel Defoe and Lytton Strachey and on to James Baldwin, Joan Didion, and Jamaica Kincaid in our own time. Whether grounded in observation, autobiography, or research, much of the most beautiful, daring, and original writing over the past few decades can be categorized as nonfiction. Graywolf is excited to increase its commitment to the evolving and dynamic genre.
The 2011 prize was judged by Robert Polito, author of Hollywood & God, Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, Doubles, and A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, and formerly director of the graduate writing program at the New School in New York City. He is currently president of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago.
The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is funded in part by endowed gifts from the Arsham Ohanessian Charitable Remainder Unitrust and the Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Family Foundation.
Arsham Ohanessian, an Armenian born in Iraq who came to the United States in 1952, was an avid reader and a tireless advocate for human rights and peace. He strongly believed in the power of literature and education to make a positive impact on humanity.
Ruth Easton, born in North Branch, Minnesota, was a Broadway actress in the 1920s and 1930s. The Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Family Foundation is pleased to support the work of emerging artists and writers in her honor.
Graywolf Press is grateful to Arsham Ohanessian and Ruth Easton for their generous support.
LESLIE JAMISON has published work in Harper’s, A Public Space, Oxford American, and the Believer. Her debut novel, The Gin Closet, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, and is completing a doctorate at Yale University. Find her at www.lesliejamison.com or @lsjamison.
The text of The Empathy Exams is set in Adobe Jenson Pro, a type-face drawn by Robert Slimbach and based on late-fifteenth-century types by the printer Nicolas Jenson. This book was designed by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by BookMobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
Previous Winners of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in Criticism
“An ambitious blast of fact and feeling, a nervy piece of performance art.”
—The New York Times
Paperback / Ebook available
Winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
“The most accomplished book of essays anyone has written or published so far in the 21st century.”
—Salon
Paperback / Ebook available
A debut that uses nonliterary forms to delve into a mix of obsessions
“[Monson’s] geek act has charm…. [He] revels in the way information flows through the world.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Paperback
WWW.GRAYWOLFPRESS.ORG
Many Graywolf authors are available to chat with your book club or classroom via phone and Skype. Email us at [email protected] for further details.
Visit graywolfpress.org to sign up for our monthly newsletter and to check out our many regularly updated features, including our On Craft series, Pub Talk series, Poem of the Week, author interviews, special sales, book giveaways, tour listings, catalogs, and much more.
Graywolf Press is a leading independent publisher committed to the discovery and energetic publication of contemporary American and international literature. We champion outstanding writers at all stages of their careers to ensure that diverse voices can be heard in a crowded marketplace.
We believe books that nourish the individual spirit and enrich the broader culture must be supported by attentive editing, superior design, and creative promotion.
Table of Contents
Praise
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
The Empathy Exams
Devil’s Bait
La Frontera
Morphology of the Hit
Pain Tours (I)
La Plata Perdida
Sublime, Revised
Indigenous to the Hood
The Immortal Horizon
In Defense of Saccharin(e)
Fog Count
Pain Tours (II)
Ex-Votos
Servicio Supercompleto
The Broken Heart of James Agee
Lost Boys
Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain
Works Consulted
Acknowledgments
Judge’s Afterword by Robert Polito
About the Author
The Empathy Exams: Essays Page 25