The Empathy Exams (31 page)

I think dismissing female pain as overly familiar or somehow out-of-date—twice-told, thrice-told, 1,001-nights-told—masks deeper accusations: that suffering women are playing victim, going weak, or choosing self-indulgence over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.

The wounded woman gets called a stereotype and sometimes she is. But sometimes she’s just true. I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it. Pain that gets performed is still pain. Pain turned trite is still pain. I think the charges of cliché and performance offer our closed hearts too many alibis, and I want our hearts to be open. I just wrote that. I want our hearts to be open. I mean it.

Works Consulted

Books

Agee, James, and Walker Evans.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Baxter, Charles.
Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction.

Bidart, Frank. “Ellen West,” in
The Book of the Body.

Brooks, Peter.
Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature.

Capote, Truman.
In Cold Blood.

Carson, Anne. “The Glass Essay” and “Teresa of God,” in
Glass, Irony and God.

D’Ambrosio, Charles.
Orphans.

De Beauvoir, Simone.
The Second Sex.

Dickens, Charles.
David Copperfield.

——.
Great Expectations.

Didion, Joan.
Salvador.

——.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

——.
The White Album.

Dubus, Andre.
Meditations from a Movable Chair.

Flaubert, Gustave.
Madame Bovary.

Grealy, Lucy.
Autobiography of a Face.

Hass, Robert. “Images,” in
Twentieth Century Pleasures.

Hemingway, Ernest.
For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Heti, Sheila.
How Should a Person Be?

Huggan, Graham.
The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins.

Huxley, Thomas,
Man’s Place in Nature.

Kahlo, Frida.
Diary.

Keen, Suzanne.
Empathy and the Novel.

Knapp, Caroline.
Drinking: A Love Story.

——.
Appetites: Why Women Want.

Kundera, Milan.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Malcolm, Janet.
The Journalist and the Murderer.

Manguso, Sarah.
The Two Kinds of Decay.

Martineau, Harriet.
Autobiography.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.
Phenomenology of Perception.

Nussbaum, Martha C.
Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.

——.
Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life.

Plath, Sylvia. “Cut,” “Ariel,” “Daddy,” in
Ariel.

Pope, Alexander.
The Rape of the Lock.

Propp, Vladimir.
Morphology of the Folktale.

Scarry, Elaine.
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.

Schwilling, Taryn.
The Anatomist.

Smith, Adam.
Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Solomon, Robert.
In Defense of Sentimentality.

Sontag, Susan.
Illness as Metaphor.

——.
Regarding the Pain of Others.

Stevens, Wallace.
The Necessary Angel.

——. “The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade” and “The Motive for Metaphor,” in
The Palm at the End of the Mind.

Stoker, Bram.
Dracula.

Tolstoy, Leo.
Anna Karenina.

Vollmann, William T.
Poor People.

Wallace, David Foster.
Infinite Jest.

Wilde, Oscar.
De Profundis.

Yeats, William Butler. “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” in
Last Poems.

Žižek, Slavoj.
First As Tragedy, Then As Farce.

Essays, Articles, and Stories

Barthelme, Donald. “Wrack.”
New Yorker
, October 21, 1972: 36–37.

Boyle, Molly. “How Murder Ballads Helped.”
Hairpin
, April 19, 2012.
http://thehairpin.com/2012/04/how-murder-ballads-helped-me
.

Browne, Sir Thomas. “Letter to a Friend.”

Decety, Jean. “The Neurodevelopment of Empathy in Humans.”
Developmental Neuroscience
32:4 (2010): 257–267.

Gawande, Atul. “The Itch.”
New Yorker
, June 30, 2008: 58–65.

Hoffmann, Diane E., and Anita J. Tarzian. “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain.”
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics
29:1 (Spring 2001): 13–27.

Hungerford, Amy. “Cold Fiction.”
Yale Review
99:1 (January 2011).

Irving, John. “In Defense of Sentimentality.”
New York Times
, November 25, 1979.

Jefferson, Mark. “What Is Wrong with Sentimentality?”
Mind
92 (1983): 519–529.

Johnson, John A., Jonathan M. Cheek, and Robert Smither. “The Structure of Empathy.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
45:6 (1983): 1299–1312.

Morens, David. “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.”
Emerging Infectious Diseases
8:11 (2002): 1353–1358.

Robbins, Michael. “The Constant Gardener: On Louise Glück.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
, December 4, 2012.

Rorty, Richard. “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in
On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures
, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Tanner, Michael. “Sentimentality.”
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
77 (1976–77): 127–147.

Tompkins, Jane. “Sentimental Power:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and the Politics of Literary History,” in
Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860
, 122–146. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Wallace, David Foster. “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s
Wittgenstein’s Mistress.” Review of Contemporary Fiction
10:2 (Summer 1990).

Wood, James. “Tides of Treacle.”
London Review of Books
27:12 (June 23, 2005).

Zahavi, Dan, and Soren Overgaard. “Empathy Without Isomorphism: A Phenomenological Account,” in
Empathy: From Bench to Bedside.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Musical and Dramatic Works

Amos, Tori. “Blood Roses,” “Jackie’s Strength,” “Silent All These Years.”

Björk. “Bachelorette.”

Bush, Kate. “Experiment IV,” “Wuthering Heights.”

DiFranco, Ani. “Buildings and Bridges,” “Independence Day,” “Pixie,” “Pulse,” “Swan Dive.”

Guns N’ Roses. “Sentimental Movie.”

Lewis, Leona. “Bleeding Love.”

Puccini, Giacomo.
La Bohème.

Verdi, Guiseppe.
La Traviata.

Williams, Tennessee.
A Streetcar Named Desire.

Carrie
, dir. Brian De Palma. 1976.

Girls
, created by Lena Dunham. 2012–13.

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills
(1996),
Paradise Lost 2: Revelations
(2000),
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
(2011). Dir. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky.

Women consulted for “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”

Molly Boyle, Lily Brown, Casey Cep, Harriet Clark, Merve Emre, Rachel Fagnant, Miranda Featherstone, Michelle Huneven, Colleen Kinder, Emily Matchar, Kyle McCarthy, Katie Parry, Kiki Petrosino, Nadya Pittendregh, Jaime Powers, Taryn Schwilling, Aria Sloss, Bridget Talone, Moira Weigel, and Jenny Zhang.

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to the journals where these essays first appeared: “The Empathy Exams,” “Immortal Horizon,” and “The Broken Heart of James Agee” in the
Believer
(“The Broken Heart of James Agee” reprinted in
American Writers on Class
); “Devil’s Bait” in
Harper’s
; “Fog Count” in
Oxford American
; “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” in the
Virginia Quarterly Review
; “Morphology of the Hit,” “La Plata Perdida,” “Lost Boys,” and “Sublime, Revised” in
A Public Space
; “La Frontera” in
VICE
; “Indigenous to the Hood” in
Los Angeles Review of Books
; “Ex-Votos” and “Servicio Supercompleto” in the
Paris Review Daily
(reprinted in
Paper Darts
); “In Defense of Saccharin(e)”
in Black Warrior Review.

It was an honor to work with many wonderful editors along the way: Rocco Castoro, Wes Enzinna, Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, Olivia Harrington, Roger Hodge, Heidi Julavits, Daniel Levin Becker, James Marcus, Anne McPeak, Andi Mudd, Colin Rafferty, Shelly Reed, Matthew Specktor, Karolina Waclawiak, Allison Wright, and of course Brigid Hughes at
A Public Space
—who has believed in my work since the very beginning. Much gratitude to Max Porter at Granta UK, who has promised the title tattooed in Gill Sans across his back.

Thanks also to my advisors at Yale—Amy Hungerford, Wai Chee Dimock, and Caleb Smith—who have been helpful and gracious as I’ve balanced my critical and creative lives. I feel an abiding and evolving gratitude to Charlie D’Ambrosio, who taught me early that the problem with an essay can eventually become its subject.

I am lucky to have an incredible agent in Jin Auh, tireless and fearsome champion, and I am genuinely blessed she helped this book find a home at Graywolf. Thank you Katie Dublinski, Erin Kottke, Fiona McCrae, Michael Taeckens, Steve Woodward, and especially Jeff Shotts, who has been a soulmate and stalwart from the first moment he laid his green pen on this manuscript.

I feel gratitude for the friendship, support, and guidance of so many people, especially Aria Sloss, Colleen Kinder, Harriet Clark, Rachel Fagnant, Kyle McCarthy, and Nam Le; Rebecaa Buckwalter-Poza, Chelsea Catalanotto, Casey Cep, Alexis Chema, Liz Cunningham, Charlotte Douglas, Merve Emre, Miranda Featherstone, Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Norm, Amy, Andrew, and Will Gorin, Michelle Huneven, Margot Kaminski, Elyssa Kilman, Lindsay Levine, Jess Marsh, Emily Matchar, Amalia McGibbon, Tara Menon, Cat Moore, Max Nicholas, Ben Nugent, Katie Parry, Jen Percy, Eve Peters, Kiki Petrosino, Caitlin Pilla, Nadya Pittendrigh, Jamie Powers, Amber Qureshi, Jeremy Reff, Liba Rubenstein, Jake Rubin, Taryn Schwilling, Sabrina Serrantino, Nina Siegal, Mary Simmons, Aria Sloss, Meg Swertlow, Susan Szmyt, Robin Wasserman, Julia Whicker, Abby Wild, and Jenny Zhang.

To Dave, finally, thank you: This book wouldn’t be, without you.

I’m grateful to my entire family—tangled and wonderful—and in particular to my courageous and compassionate mother, Joanne, to whom this book is dedicated with admiration and love.

Judge’s Afterword

Masters in the art of thinking against oneself, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky have taught us to side with our dangers, to broaden the sphere of our diseases, to acquire existence by division from our being.

—E. M. CIORAN

The fate of our insights is often perilous, as though even our most elementary thinking were a resistant signal only transmittable through static, or disappearing ink. Many have sought to operate along the borders of the body, pain, shame, defiance, vision, and doubt without double-crossing those insights with ready-made glamour, whether charm or scorn. Near the conclusion of her own magnificent 1994 reconnaissance of those elusive psychic perimeters,
Autobiography of a Face
, Lucy Grealy wrote:

I used to think truth was eternal, that once I
knew
, once I
saw
, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work all our lives to remember the most basic things.