The Empathy Exams: Essays [Paperback]

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

APublishers WeeklyTop Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014

Beginning 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 painreal and imagined, her own and others'Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. 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 territoryfrom poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarcerationin its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

Leslie Jamisonis the author of a novel,The Gin Closet, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her essays have appeared inBeliever,Harper's Magazine,Oxford American, andTin House. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Extraordinary. . . . she calls to mind writers as disparate as Joan Didion and John Jeremiah Sullivan as she interrogates the palpitations of not just her own trippy heart but of all of ours. . . . Her cerebral, witty, multichambered essays tend to swing around to one topic in particular: what we mean when we say we feel someone else's pain. . . . I'm not sure I'm capable of recommending a book because it might make you a better person. But watching the philosopher in Ms. Jamison grapple with empathy is a heart-expanding exercise. Dwight Garner, The New York Times