Way too heavy on the metaphors, though, to the point of turning them into metafives.

She must have just finished her MFA when she wrote it because it just drips with MFA-ishness: for example, say that 'It was like something is XYZ, until it absolutely isn't' and then say that about something else a little later, and then say it again, except reverse the location of the is and isn't, and of course, don't forget to use the f-word, even where it is glaringly out-of-place, because every fucking writer should use the f-word, and be sure to describe the Mountain Dew soft drink as pee-colored. Instead, it's just a chance for her to use her past to show off an impressive writing style (being somewhat similar to Marilynne Robinson and Joan Didion). The author loves to talk about all she has been through, and that would be fine if it were done in a way that helped us (or even her) learn something from it. Instead of helping me to better understand empathy, it is the most self-serving piece of shit I've read in a long time. The book starts out great, and the first 20% or so of it is has me seeing myself writing a review that says 'This book nourished me and made me feel more human.' But, before even another 20% had gone by I was ready to throw the book against the wall. I cannot recover the time I wasted on this book, but I can make sure I never read another book by this author. 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.

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.īeginning 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.

The empathy exams review