The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

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.

The Gin Closet, a novel written by Leslie Jamison, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. Her work has been published in publications such as the Believer, Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Place, Tin House, and The Best American Essays. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and writes a regular column for the New York Times Book Review.