I Used to Insist I Didn’t Get Angry. Not Anymore.
An essay examining women’s long-standing conditioning away from owning and expressing anger, instead often sublimating their rage in sadness, which has historically been more acceptable.
The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future
Leslie Jamison profiles several long-term, hard-core users of Second Life, an online platform in which you create a fantasy alter-ego. Your “selective self” resides in a virtual world that allows you to leave behind everything you don’t like about yourself and your real life.
In the Shadow of a Fairy Tale
Leslie Jamison is stepmother to Lily, age 6. Lily’s mother died of cancer just before Lily turned three. Jamison explores fairy tale stepmothers both as the rare “port in the storm” and the much more common “stock villain” — stereotyped by cruelty, abuse, and withholding affection — as she reflects on her relationship with Lily and on navigating the fraught role of stand-in parent.
The Possibilities of the Personal
Leslie Jamison’s speech on writing about personal experiences. “If you honor the complexity of your own life—if you grant us entry into moments that hold shame or hurt or heat, and if you’re willing to follow that heat, to feel out where all the small fires burn, then your readers will trust you.”
Confessional Writing Is Not Self-indulgent
The author of The Empathy Exams on the power of personal stories.
The Empathy Exams
An affecting essay about medical acting, illness, and empathy:
I grow accustomed to comments that feel aggressive in their formulaic insistence: That must really be hard [to have a dying baby], That must really be hard [to be afraid you’ll have another seizure in the middle of the grocery store], That must really be hard [to carry in your uterus the bacterial evidence of cheating on your husband]. Why not say, I couldn’t even imagine?
Other students seem to understand that empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion. They won’t even press the stethoscope to my skin without asking if it’s OK. They need permission. They don’t want to presume. Their stuttering unwittingly honors my privacy: “Can I… could I… would you mind if I—listened to your heart?” “No,” I tell them. “I don’t mind.” Not minding is my job. Their humility is a kind of compassion in its own right. Humility means they ask questions, and questions mean they get answers, and answers mean they get points on the checklist: a point for finding out my mother takes Wellbutrin, a point for getting me to admit I’ve spent the last two years cutting myself, a point for finding out my father died in a grain elevator when I was two—for realizing that a root system of loss stretches radial and rhizomatic under the entire territory of my life.
