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Making Essay Cool: The Power of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams
There’s a seldom-spoken understanding among creative nonfiction writers (at least there was in my MFA program), that if you find yourself in front of an agent pitching your latest work, you should never EVER describe what you have created as a “collection of essays.” You’re supposed to know, at least by the time you are ready to be face-to-face with an agent, that essays aren’t marketable. They are the opposite of the type of writing that might garner a book advance.
In the MFA program, the essay is essential — the Swiss Army knife of form, empowering a writer to tackle all manner of subjects through all manner of style. One can whittle and maim, uncork spirits or cut out a heart. It is safe and unsafe, something with which you might even trust a child, but not without first explaining the danger of what can happen with its misuse. For a creative nonfiction writer, the essay is a rite of passage, like the overnight field trip in the fifth grade — sleep-away camp, where you’re forced to confront and explore all the wonders and anxieties of your newly expanded world.
But in the literary marketplace, essay is the sweater vest, the SNL-spoof of NPR (Delicious Dish, anyone?). At its best, it seems to be viewed as the narrow humor section of the bookstore, à la the great David Sedaris. At its worst: the faded, silk-flowered storefront in a dying Midwestern town. No, we essayists are told, best to characterize your work as an autobiographical novel, a series of linked stories, or gonzo journalism if you can pull it off — something that might actually sell.
Except in recent months, I’ve noticed a change in the tide, or rather, what feels like a geologic shift: Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams is a summer blockbuster in both the independent and popular markets. Her collection, featuring essays that examine human pain and how we handle one another’s pain, made its debut on the New York Times bestseller list (among other bestseller lists) this year, and has been noted by Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, and NPR as a book to watch out for — almost unheard of for this particular genre.
How has she done this?
Notwithstanding Jamison’s compelling topic, I think what we’re seeing is something bigger — something specific to the form. Not just the essay, but the personal essay: the form that weaves personal narrative into its history and research and facts. And personal story is the element with which Jamison has particular skill. Her work speaks directly to us, bridges a connection through our shared vulnerabilities. Like a camera in a documentary, she says: look at this person’s condition, now take a look at mine. Feel what we feel, experience our stories, let them tingle with your own. Then pull back and see how they fit the bigger puzzle. In so doing, Jamison has made relevant our own little earthquakes.
Turns out our hunger for connection is greater than our desire to be entertained.
Or maybe it’s just our fatigue with the increasingly formulaic approach to literature. Chick Lit. Vampires. 50 Shades of Sex. Maybe we are just weary from the staging that’s required of us in this reality TV culture: cultivating Twitter and Facebook perfection while our souls are tiring out.
Our souls are tiring out.
Jamison herself says, “When you write, you do the work of connecting that terrible privacy to everything beyond it.” That’s the power of the personal essay: its careful reconstruction and examination, even wrestling of something studied to weave a complex tapestry of people and places and experiences and desires — the threads of which readers will recognize from their own lives. Recognize and lean in, because something about it thrums. Awakens a familiar smell.
With the arrival of The Empathy Exams, I dare say the anxiety I feel about calling myself an essayist — even to an agent — has subsided, perhaps even evolved into something more like pride.
photo credits:
The Empathy Exams book cover courtesy of NPR.org
Sweater vest nerd image courtesy of derfmagazine.com
Leslie Jamison headshot by Colleen Kinder, image courtesy of publishersweekly.com
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