The Empathy Exams: Essays

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

A Publishers Weekly Top 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 pain--real 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 territory--from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration--in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

Author: Leslie Jamison
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 04/01/2014
Pages: 226
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.60w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781555976712
Award: New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association Award - Winner
Award: Indies Choice Book Awards - Honor Book

About the Author

Leslie Jamison is 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 in Believer, Harper's Magazine, Oxford American, and Tin House. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.