The Empathy Exams (33 page)

Authors: Leslie Jamison

BOOK: The Empathy Exams

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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