A short life of the author
Leslie Jamison (born 1983) is one of the most important American essayists of the twenty-first century, and The Empathy Exams (2014) — a collection of essays about pain, illness, empathy, and the performance of feeling — was a landmark that helped define the contemporary personal essay as a major literary form. Her subsequent work, particularly The Recovering (2018), extended her range into memoir and cultural criticism, and her name is now inseparable from the broader revival of nonfiction as a space for literary ambition.
Life and Career
Jamison was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Los Angeles. She studied at Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and holds a PhD from Yale. She teaches at Columbia University’s MFA program.
Her debut, The Gin Closet (2010), was a novel. But it was The Empathy Exams (2014, Graywolf Press) that made her reputation. The title essay — about working as a medical actor, simulating symptoms for medical students to practice diagnosing — became a touchstone for conversations about empathy, pain, and the limits of emotional identification. Other essays in the collection explore the Barkley Marathons ultrarace, the “wounds” of female characters in literature, the author’s own heart surgery, and violence against women in Central America. The book’s method — weaving personal experience, reportage, and cultural criticism into a single texture — became a model for the form.
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (2018) is her most ambitious work: a memoir of her own alcoholism and recovery that is simultaneously a cultural history of addiction narratives — from Berryman to Carver to Didion to David Foster Wallace. The book argues against the Romantic mythology of the addicted genius while honestly confronting how that mythology shaped her own drinking. It won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.
Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019) collected later essays. Splinters (2024), a memoir about early motherhood and divorce, extended her autobiographical project.
Key Works
- The Empathy Exams (2014)
- The Recovering (2018)
- Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019)
- Splinters (2024)
Collecting Jamison
The Empathy Exams first edition (Graywolf Press, 2014) signed brings $50–$150. The Recovering first edition (Little, Brown, 2018) signed brings $40–$100. Jamison signs at readings and events. Graywolf Press first editions are the collected form for her essay work; they tend to hold value due to the press’s literary reputation. Her bibliography is growing and her market is steady.