Interview: Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison is an American novelist and essayist known for her award-winning collection of essays, The Empathy Exams. This week, she will visit campus to give a public reading from her collection, as well as to participate in a panel discussion on how to document, inhabit and care for the pain of others. In anticipation of Jamison’s visit to campus, Recess editor Katie Fernelius interviewed Jamison. Over the course of a few days, they emailed back and forth, discussing the timeliness of conversations about empathy, the role of writers in conversations about injustice and the power of the stories shared with children.

The Chronicle: 2014 was a year full of difficult headlines, from the shootings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and others to the UC Santa Barbara massacre, to the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa. 2014 was also the year that your book The Empathy Exams was published. This shared timeline feels very apt (and maybe cosmically-willed) since conversations on and offline challenged so many folks to empathize (e.g. #YesAllWomen, #BlackLivesMatter, #IllRideWithYou). How did current events inform your conversations while you traveled around the country and promoted your book? How did it impact you as a writer, especially as a writer of a book that is oriented around the exploration of empathy?

Leslie Jamison: I felt so many things simultaneously about the ways in which the release and promotion of my book––and its exploration of empathy––was intersecting with a world that seemed to need more empathy so badly: mainly I felt sadness, about each new iteration of loss and injustice. During all this, I was getting asked to talk to medical students and therapists––people who certainly knew much more about the daily clinical practice of empathy than I did––and I was getting asked questions about Ebola and Michael Brown and beheading videos. I was speaking alongside psychologists and scientists who had been studying and publishing about empathy for years.

It forced me to clarify what my book was and wasn't (it's a collection of investigations, not conclusions; it's not a treatise or a set of ethical instructions)––and what I was and wasn't; what the role of writer might be amidst the clamor of all these various kinds of voices: clinicians, activists, journalists. I tried to turn speaking gigs into an opportunity to listen to perspectives from people who had different kinds of first-hand experience than I did (doctors and therapists, for example).

I'm ultimately more of a questioner than an answerer, and it was always my hope that the questions the book raises would feel useful to people as they resonated in the particular corners of their lives, or their disciplines––but part of the book is also about the limits of feeling, the limits of empathy and the danger of mistaking affect for action. So I suppose everything that kept happening in the world made me feel the importance of writing––how much it matters to make things visible––but also the edges of my own role; how much it left undone.

TC: What do you think writing leaves undone when it comes to such issues?

LJ: I think writing can be part of a process (useful in raising awareness, exploring dilemmas, articulating problematic action or inaction) but it's structurally distinct, like all kinds of impact, and has its limits: it can change how people think about Ebola in Africa, but it can't actually treat Ebola patients in Africa. It can ask people to remember the dead or to honor the significance of their deaths, and it can inspire people to protest the abiding systemic injustice these deaths point to; but it doesn't bring back the dead; or issue a courtroom verdict or a grand jury decision. It does a different kind of work than thousands of bodies marching on the street; it's not a substitute for other kinds of activism, whose architecture enables collective action in large-scale forceful ways.

I guess I'm interested less in comparing the relative impacts of all these kinds of work and more in thinking about how they can supplement and catalyze each other. My dad's a global health economist––he does research on how money can be spent to make a difference in easing disease burden around the world––which means, basically, getting the most good health for your dollar. It's a different language and a different way of talking about suffering, but what he wants to do feels fundamentally important to me, close to my own heart. Seeing work done by people I love in spheres quite removed from my own––it's been expanding and inspiring to me.

LJ: Completion always feels embedded in me rather than the piece itself––less like the things itself feels "done," and more that I've given it everything I can. The Gin Closet feels like the crystallization of a particular stage in my imagination, in my psyche––I gave it what I could, what I was, when I was writing it. But I'm also someone different now. So there is a sense of "unfinished business," but more on the scale of my work unfolding across time––the other things I was going to write next––than the sense of thinking that I should have stayed longer with that particular work. It marked a moment; then I moved to the moments that followed.

TC: I am an aunt to two nieces and a nephew. I find that the exploration of what and how it is to be in this world emerges in my writing a lot and I often find myself implicitly writing for them about the world they are going to inherit. You recently became a stepmother. What sort of stories do you share with your stepdaughter? Has her entrance into your life impacted your thinking or writing in expected or unexpected ways?

LJ: This is a huge and wonderful question––my stepdaughter has changed my life in huge and wonderful ways. I'll just say one very specific thing that's on my mind right now: reading stories to my stepdaughter at night makes me think so much about what narrative does for us, how it introduces us to danger in a contained form. The nightly ritual asks me to trust that she can handle some level of danger in these stories––that we don't need to protect children from everything; that exposure in the context of safety is part of what narrative does, part of how it enlarges us. But I'm also aware of some protection still being necessary––how real stories can be for kids, how much power and sway they can hold––how they can become the whole world.

TC: What sort of stories did your parents share with you when you were young? Which ones have stuck with you?

LJ: Great question. Reading at bedtime was a huge part of my childhood: The Once and Future King, The Famous Five, The Faraway Tree, The Narnia Chronicles. That feeling of getting excited for total immersion in a world––and sharing that immersion with the people I loved most––was basically heaven; it gave me a kind of muscle memory for the magic of what stories can be.

But I also grew up with lots of true stories about how to live in the world and wonder about it and question it. One example: my mom told me about traveling across Europe when she was young, picking olives in the French countryside and ultimately organizing a strike with her fellow workers there; because they were all being forced to work out in the cold for ten hour days. She wasn't making herself out to be some kind of hero, but she was opening me up to this sense of the world as a place that could be questioned or changed, not taken at face value––where the status quo wasn't necessarily just.

Leslie Jamison will give a public reading Wednesday at 7 p.m. in Nelson Music Room on East Campus. She will also participate in a panel called “Ghost Pain: Caregiving, Documentary, and Radical Empathy” alongside scholar Jehanne Gheith and undergraduate photographer Lauren Henschel. The panel will be hosted Thursday at noon through The Forum for Scholars and Publics.