Scan barcode
A review by sarahetc
The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison
1.0
You know you might need to read a book about empathy when you're reading a book about empathy and you keep thinking, "Nobody gives a shit about your feelings!"
But back up with me for a second. The Empathy Exams is a series of essays, ostensibly on how we cultivate and experience empathy. It fronts like explorations of all the varieties of shared human pain. What is really is, though, is Leslie Jamison's experience of pain and how much she wants you to know she is in pain, experiencing pain, even other peoples' pain, and how that makes her a better, more significant person. It's a tour de force of performance agony. Nobody can experience anything that Leslie will not be along to inhabit. Except the parents of the victims of the now exonerated West Memphis 3. They're just angry. Anger doesn't make Leslie more significant, so she dismisses them and their dead children.
I've always felt a certain amount of contempt for people who academize their own internal lives. In an entire world of ideas, you think the most worthwhile thing is to dig down deep inside yourself and report on your findings, as if they are and should be relevant to everyone else? That the self and its foibles are reified with the language of semiotic deconstruction. Really? There is not enough room in the known universe for me to roll my eyes.
And that is exactly how empathetic I am.
But back up with me for a second. The Empathy Exams is a series of essays, ostensibly on how we cultivate and experience empathy. It fronts like explorations of all the varieties of shared human pain. What is really is, though, is Leslie Jamison's experience of pain and how much she wants you to know she is in pain, experiencing pain, even other peoples' pain, and how that makes her a better, more significant person. It's a tour de force of performance agony. Nobody can experience anything that Leslie will not be along to inhabit. Except the parents of the victims of the now exonerated West Memphis 3. They're just angry. Anger doesn't make Leslie more significant, so she dismisses them and their dead children.
I've always felt a certain amount of contempt for people who academize their own internal lives. In an entire world of ideas, you think the most worthwhile thing is to dig down deep inside yourself and report on your findings, as if they are and should be relevant to everyone else? That the self and its foibles are reified with the language of semiotic deconstruction. Really? There is not enough room in the known universe for me to roll my eyes.
And that is exactly how empathetic I am.