A Personal History of the C-Section
“When my daughter’s delivery went off the script I had imagined, it made me wonder about what we ask from our birth stories.”
The Past Year Has Taught Me a Lot About Nostalgia
“Yearning for the Before Times as a mythic era risks obscuring the ways in which the Before was really many different kinds of before. Longing for freedom and safety risks forgetting that neither mobility nor vulnerability has ever been democratically distributed.”
COVID Has Caused Millions to Lose their Sense of Smell—One Writer’s Journey to a Scentless Life and Back
“Every smell scientist I spoke to for this story echoed some version of this sentiment: that smell is underappreciated and misunderstood, and most people fail to recognize how integral it is to our experience of pleasure, our emotional lives, and even, on a fundamental level, our identity.”
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Leslie Jamison reviews “Private Lives Public Spaces,” an exhibition of home movies and photography at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. What makes the exhibit fascinating is the thread of desire that runs through it — that keen human need to document our present as it all-too-quickly turns into our past.
Since I Became Symptomatic
A month after filing for divorce, single mom Leslie Jamison contracted COVID-19. She wrote this meditation on single parenthood, loneliness, longing, and frustration while sheltering in place — and sweating out the virus — with her 2-year-old daughter.
Cult of the Literary Sad Woman
If sadness once struck me as terminally hip, then I’ve arrived on the far side of 35 with a deepening appreciation for the ways pleasure and satisfaction can become structuring forces of identity as well.
The Quickening
A memoir of giving birth after years with an eating disorder.
Leslie Jamison On The Lies She’s Told
Big lies, small lies, lies of omission. Leslie Jamison fesses up to how lying had become a way to avoid conflict, her flaws, and having to face up to and deal with her uglier emotions.
Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?
In this excerpt from her book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison recalls how in the early days of recovery, she examined the work of newly-sober writers like John Berryman and Charles Jackson for clues about how sobriety would affect her as a writer. It wasn’t until she read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that she found “proof that sober creativity was possible.”
The Breakup Museum: Archiving the Way We Were
Essayist Leslie Jamison visits the Breakup Museum in Zagreb, Croatia — created in 2003 after founders Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić ended their relationship — and considers what stories are told by the objects we shared with former loved ones.
