Book Review: The Empathy Exams
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The Empathy Exams is a series of short creative memoirs by Leslie Jamison. They begin with a look at the author’s stint as a medical actor, proceed through a series of essays about her travels in Latin America, and go on to cover assorted topics from the Barkley Marathon to a critique of female pain and its place in Western culture.
There are basically two themes in these essays: post-structuralism and extreme narcissism. The post-structuralism is sometimes interesting, though it does get a little overbearing and pointless in some places. In particular the travel memoirs seem almost obsessed with the act of decomposing their own structure - so much so that they lose focus and don’t have much of a point. The narcissism, on the other hand, isn’t interesting; it renders the book nearly unreadable. Some degree of navel-gazing is to be expected in creative memoir, of course, but in this book it is just off the charts.
One case in point is “Morphology of a Hit”, perhaps the essay I enjoyed most. Before reading this essay, I didn’t know anything about Vladimir Propp and his book, “Morphology of the Folktale”, so I appreciated learning about the topic. Jamison’s essay is a piece of post-structuralist writing about a somewhat obscure piece of structuralist writing - very clever, certainly an interesting concept. Into this concept Jamison shoehorns her own experience on the streets on Nicaragua (in brief: some ruffian broke her nose and stole her digital camera). So layered on top of the post-structuralist concept is the idea that the morphology of this essay is all jumbled up, in just the way Jamison’s nose was broken so cruelly. As a general rule I find that one big idea in a piece of writing is pretty interesting, and two or more is very challenging to pull off. This essay doesn’t pull it off - the execusion falls flat. The writing is awkward and self-satisfied, overstuffed with literary gymnastics that ultimately make it a chore to read. There are too many ideas, and it seems to me that the main point of the essay is not to get these ideas across, but rather to prove how clever the author was to have come up with all of them. It’s a fundamentally poor piece of writing.
Worst of all is the final essey, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”. The title promises a certain degree of pretense and pompousness, and the piece over-delivers on that promise. Fittingly, the entire essay is a royal pain in the neck - it’s an unpleasant read with little or no value to the reader. Again the initial concept is so promising and interesting; Jamison examines the concept of female pain and its place in Western culture, tackling everything from the biblical notion that women are doomed to deliver their children in pain to the trope of the damsel in distress. Here we are overwhelmed not just by the author’s own tale of woe, but rambling digressions into any idea or thought that seems to have crossed her mind while writing. The stated goal of the essay is to decide, once and for all - how should writers describe female pain honestly, without exploitation or other cultural baggage? It’s a fascinating and important question, well worth thoughtful consideration. Instead what the reader gets is this gem, paraphrased a little: “every instance of female pain is news, though maybe not as important as some other pieces of news.” That’s an underwhelming conclusion if I ever read one - it’s just a vapid truism. Of course every instance of female pain is news - everything that happens anywhere, to anyone, is news, according to this extremely weak definition. Why not just stamp that idea on a coffee mug and save the reader thirty-some pages of agony?
The book is not without some worthwhile pieces. “The Immortal Horizon,” an essay about the Barkley Marathon that is perhaps the most journalistic piece, is a pretty fascinating story. “Devil’s Bait,” “Fog Count,” and “The Lost Boys” are a little uncomfortable, but interesting topics. The book shines when it examines life at the margins, when it attempts to offer sympathy to those who need it most. Of course, the overriding theme of extreme narcissism means that these essays are not really sympathetic at all. In “Fog Count”, for instance, the details of a federal inmate’s horrific experience at the hands of an unfeeling bureaucracy seem to be reduced to a series of “gifts” given to the author.
Writ large, the goal in these essays is actually the exact opposite of empathy. The point of the writing is not to understand the feelings of others but rather to use those feelings in an attempt to glorify the author’s own erudition and experience. I suppose it’s kind of an interesting literary experiment, but the results of that experiment are not promising - the writing is incoherent, the ideas poorly communicated, the reader’s time wasted.
If it’s not already obvious - I’m a guy critiquing a woman’s writing, some of it on some very sensitive feminist topics. I’m writing from a position of privilege, and it’s more than possible that my own position is blinding me to important ideas. There’s actually a pretty long history of guys accusing women of narcissism as a way to ignore what those women were saying - and it’s possible this review is part of the problem. Maybe so! Feel free to take all of the above with a grain of salt.
With that said, I wouldn’t recommend the book. It’s just an unpleasant experience which wraps a handful of interesting insights in many layers of aimless and uninteresting writing.