The Empathy Exams in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Dec 09, 2014 Jeff Scott rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, female, essays, empathy

"If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...Until you climb inside of his skin
and walk around in it." ~ Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird)

Leslie Jamison’s Empathy Exams is a test for every reader. True empathy goes beyond understanding a point of view, it’s caring about another individual as a cherished item. She presents examples such as testing a docto "If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...Until you climb inside of his skin
and walk around in it." ~ Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird)

Leslie Jamison’s Empathy Exams is a test for every reader. True empathy goes beyond understanding a point of view, it’s caring about another individual as a cherished item. She presents examples such as testing a doctor’s bedside manner, understanding an illness that may be psychosomatic, and demonstrates how empathy can change involving a murder. She goes beyond most of her essays forcing the reader to look in the mirror and see their own reactions to these stories. Her approach and writing style render all her characters vulnerable and forces us to look at the monsters of our own judgment.

In The Empathy Exams, the author is an actor pretending to be a patient. She is given medical diagnoses and told to act out the parts in front of doctors who are then scored on how much they cared and identified with the patient. Do the doctor's really sense her pain? Do they really care? In The Devil's Bait, she investigates the mysterious and controversial Morgellons Disease. It forces the reader to decide whether empathy is helpful or hurtful, enabling the victims terror of the self. In Defense of the Saccharine she exams why we have such a repulsion to writing and sentiments that are too sweet, too generous or trite. She tells further stories of pain and suffering. She provides a path to caring if we choose to see it. The real masterpiece is the Grand Theory of Female Pain. This alone sells the entire books.

The collection of the book works surprisingly well. It seems many of the essays were written at different times over many years. Despite the lag, these writings work together beautifully demonstrating the power of the writer's theme of empathy over time. The writer's strength stands out over time and not just the topic. This should be required reading for many people.

Favorite Passages:
Empathy isn't just listening; it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see: p 15

Your own embarrassment lingers. Maybe moral outrage is just the culmination of an insoluble lingering. So prepare yourself to live in it for a while. Hydrate for the ride. The great shame of your privilege is a
hot blush the whole time. The truth of this place is infinite and irreducible and self-reflexive anguish might feel like the only thing you can offer in return. It might be hard to hear anything above the
clattering machinery of your guilt. Try to listen anyway.
Page 82

This is benevolence as surprise, evidence of a grace beyond the self that has, of course, come from the self—the same self that loaded the fanny pack hours before, whose role has been obscured by bone weary
delusion. So it goes. One morning a man blows a conch shell, and two days later—still answering the call of that conch, another man finds all he needs strapped to his own body, where he can neither expect nor explain it.
Page 120 ...more

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