![]() ![]() She hovers just past the edge of comfort she is willing to push the knife in deeper, inch by inch. ![]() ![]() By the time we reach this phrase in the final essay, the wrenching “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”, we are fully aware that Jamison does dwell in wounds, but not quite in the way her boyfriend was suggesting. When Jamison is told by a boyfriend that she is a “wound dweller”, the implication is that she is a self-pitying wallower, forever picking at scabs. And, in the astonishing title essay, perhaps something approaching a combination of the two, when Jamison works as a medical actor at a teaching hospital, internalising the pain of fictional patients and weaving their narratives with her own. Her own – a heart condition, an abortion, struggles with alcohol, a violent attack on a darkened street – or that of others, such as sufferers of Morgellons, a disease that many doctors dismiss as psychosomatic or a trio of boys wrongfully imprisoned for decades. The 11 essays in Leslie Jamison’s extraordinary new collection, The Empathy Exams, are about pain. ![]()
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