Why am I passionate about this?
I have always been fascinated with bodies: the meaning we make of them; the suffering, joy, and indignities we receive through them; the outer limits of what we can do to and with them. I’ve worked in careers that have asked a lot of my own body, and I write about the brutalities humans inflict upon our own and other bodies. My work is obsessed with questions of how and why we endure suffering. Also, I’ve done a lot of dumb shit to and with my own body that has given me (in addition to a lifetime of medical problems) a highly specific perspective about intensity, hazard, and pain.
Margo's book list on horrible things happening to your body
Why did Margo love this book?
If I could only have one book for the rest of my life it would be this one.
The ur-text of braided essays, and of essay collections, LJ asks us to look at pain, obsession, care, and empathy through radically surprising lenses. In my favorite of the collected essays, “The Devil’s Bait,” she creates a sense of quantum reality that demands that the reader see their own skepticism and ableism, while at the same time implanting a persistent anxiety around the possibility that they might in fact be vulnerable to the very thing they are judging.
2 authors picked The Empathy Exams as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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…