The Empathy Exams

by Leslie Jamison

the deeply earnest clichés of recovery represented one vector of literary possibility: the recuperated sentimentality of “single-entendre” writing, big crude crayon-drawing feelings that could actually render us porous to one another—clichés that he positioned inside the infinitely complicated landscape of his imagined worlds. He was searching for literature that could make our “heads throb heartlike,” that could hold feeling and its questioning at once. I believe in the possibility of this heartlike throbbing. I believe in the possibility of Christmas risks. I believe in an interrogated sentimentality that doesn’t allow its distortions to be inherited so easily. I want to make a case for the value of that moment when we feel sentimentality punctured—when we feel its flatness revealed, that sense of a vista splitting open or opening out. Something useful happens in that moment of breakage. After the sugar high, always, dwells a sharpened sense of everything not sweet. If the saccharine offers some undiluted spell of feeling—oversimplified and unabashedly fictive—then perhaps its value lies in the process of emerging from its thrall: that sense of unmasking, that sense of guilt. We try to wring tears from the stars but can’t ever quite forget the cracked kettles of our attempts, or the ways our music is always broken. I want us to feel swollen by sentimentality and then hurt by it, betrayed by its flatness, wounded by the hard glass surface of its sky. This is one way to ap...