The Empathy Exams
The debut that announced the new essay renaissance of the 2010s. Personal essays about pain and the medical industry that were formally daring and emotionally precise. Jamison turns the self's most uncomfortable territories into investigation.
Nearly every subject in this book circles back to Jamison herself. The clearest case is the Morgellons-disease essay, which closes with her wondering if she has the disease too, and reviewers set her own catalogue of pain, a mugging, a parasite, an abortion, against a biography that includes Harvard and a Yale PhD, calling the mismatch the book’s central flaw. Fog Count, her account of visiting an acquaintance in a West Virginia prison, draws a specific complaint: readers say she spends “a disproportionate amount of the essay talking about the vending machines” instead of the man she came to see. Lost Boys, on the West Memphis Three, gets named the weakest essay, built more from documentaries she watched as a teenager than any real reporting. Detractors call the prose in her most acclaimed pieces one that “drips with MFA-ishness”, reducing the whole project to “the Tortured Artist trope”.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
