The new book does enrich that project, if slowly it starts off as a skillful retread and then shifts. In pieces on ultramarathoners and poverty tourists and people suffering from mysterious (and perhaps psychosomatic) illnesses, Jamison defended the creative impulse as a moral one, even as she worried that her art involved the exploitation of those she wrote about. Empathy-feeling with or as someone else-projects the self onto another, and metaphor projects meaning onto the world. One feat of that volume, from 2014, was to establish an analogy between the mechanics of empathy and those of metaphor.
Her writing, although lyrical, proceeds with a precise, searching sobriety-each sentence a controlled swoon.Ī question raised by these new essays is whether they advance the work done by “ The Empathy Exams,” Jamison’s breakthrough book. (A stepmother becomes “a token mascot of the dark maternal.”) She thinks ethically but feels aesthetically. Jamison, who has also authored an addiction memoir, “ The Recovering,” can pin an idea with the speed and fluidity of a pro athlete. Stylistically, the book is almost frustratingly eloquent. “Make It Scream, Make It Burn,” a new collection of essays by Leslie Jamison, meets many of the prerequisites conjured by the phrase “collection of essays by Leslie Jamison.” It explores notions of witness, storytelling, and authenticity of art and morality and of pain-others’ and one’s own. Leslie Jamison, the author of “Make It Scream, Make It Burn.” Photograph by Franck Ferville / Agence VU / Redux
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