An Interview with Leslie Jamison

WEST 10TH: You started as a fiction writer, and you published a novel. What brought you to nonfiction?

JAMISON: There are a couple of different ways to answer that. One very concrete way is that I decided to take a nonfiction class while I was getting my MFA at Iowa. I had a friend—who is still one of my best friends—who was in the nonfiction program, and I was excited by what she was doing, so I took a class. I still remember the three pieces I wrote for that class. The first two were straight-out personal essays, and I think I was engaged by that work, but it was really the third essay I wrote for that class that made me aware that nonfiction was a realm that I was deeply drawn to and had a lot of unfinished business with. What felt so exciting about working on that essay was that it was the first time I said an essay could basically be whatever I want it to be—it doesn’t have to just be personal experience, it doesn’t have to be just criticism, it doesn’t have to be just cultural history. I liked how capacious the essay was, I liked that it felt like this chamber that a lot of different things could be held inside of. It was the expe- rience of working on that essay and getting excited by the genre that planted a seed. There was some kind of spark there. Then, when I was working on my second novel—which wasn’t going well and was a huge source of frustration for me for years and years—I started really writing essays again, almost as an escape from that project. It felt like they brought an enchantment back to writing that I was having trou- ble accessing at that point with fiction. It gave me a way to be inside my life and outside my life at once in a way that was harder for me to manage in fiction.

WEST 10TH: As much as your nonfiction writing in The Empathy Ex- ams is “personal,” it’s also highly analytical. It engages with sociologi- cal inquiries, journalism and criticism. I’m wondering how you manage to balance this hybrid form formally, incorporating both memoir-like narratives and larger, more abstract conclusions about the human con- dition. How do you integrate these differing forms into coherent prose?

JAMISON: It’s such a great question, and I’m really glad that you asked it—partially because sometimes I get frustrated when the work is just categorized as personal narrative or memoiristic narrative. Not because I think there should be any shame attached to personal narra- tive, but because I think there’s a kind of constricting gaze that wants to see personal narrative as very limited and unambitious, especially when it’s women writing it, that doesn’t see the ways that lots of peo- ple who write personal narratives are also looking outwards in great ways. The question about form is good, though, because for me, every essay is a different formal and structural proposition. So the structural weave looks a different way in each piece. The title essay in the collec- tion is one where early on that essay was much less personal. It was much more abstract in its texture. I gave a draft to a mentor of mine and he basically said, “It feels like you’re walking up to the edge of certain personal experiences but not allowing yourself to fully engage them.” He said that my tone had a coldness to it, something almost clinical, when describing my personal experiences as a medical actor, and it gave me this idea to choose some of my own experiences and tell them in the form of one of the scripts. And that became an ex- citing, interesting, engaging formal proposition. I almost tricked my- self or coaxed myself into bringing more personal narrative into the piece. In that case, employing a form allowed me to bring myself into an essay where I was having trouble. And then there are other cases where form has allowed me to bring in something outside of personal experience. A good example of that would be the essay “Morphology of the Hit,” where I talk about getting hit on the street in Nicaragua, which is something I was interested in writing about but something I had zero interest in writing a straight personal narrative about. It felt so flat and pointless—lots of people have been hit in the face, why am I telling this story? At that point I had been starting my PhD program and I thought, “What if I used Vladimir Propp’s building blocks of traditional Russian fairytales to see if I could tell my story with his parts?” Again, it was something about the structural experiment that allowed me to go back into my own life with some kind of organizing principle and bring in another voice that got me thinking about how narrative works. For me, structure is always an incredibly vital part about how the personal narrative and other strands are working together. Part of what’s fun is figuring out a different structural answer for every project.

WEST 10TH: You said this style of writing that we’re labeling as per- sonal or confessional can come up against a certain amount of criticism, especially when written by a woman. What is your approach to combating these biased dismissals of confessional-type women’s writing?

JAMISON: The bottom line for me is just trying to do work that I’m proud of. I had to confront a while back the reality that I wasn’t going to be able to control the ways everybody responded to it. I was on such an amazing journey with that essay collection and it reached so many readers and was so gratifying and kind of unreal to me, but I was really interested in what felt like a very strong animosity to- wards the book from a small but vocal minority of online reviewers. People can get very angry at the idea of a writer who wants to talk about herself. That anger and that resistance, I think, holds something worth examining. It seems like the idea is that if you talk about your- self or talk about difficult experience, that means you think your ex- perience is extraordinary or that you’ve suffered extraordinarily. I’m really interested in pushing back against the notion that telling your story implies that you think your story is extraordinary or better than other people’s or more important than other people’s, because I really believe that every single person who’s alive has a thousand stories worth telling. For me to tell mine is, for me internally, participating in what I think is interesting about humanity rather than saying, “Oh I think my story is more interesting than yours or yours or yours.” I find this really interesting to teach about. The first course I taught at Columbia’s MFA program was called “Confession and Shame” and was all about the connection between those two concepts in multiple senses—how sometimes the material that holds the most heat to write about is the material that connects somehow to a feeling of shame, and also, what is the shame attached to the word confessional? I don’t think confessional is the best word, partially because of its connection to a religious tradition and idea that you go to confession because you’ve done something wrong. That framework doesn’t really apply to what I think happens in a lot of nonfiction—it’s not about seeking absolution or confessing a sin or wrongdoing. But I’m definitely in- terested in pushing back against the sorts of criticism that are leveled against confessional work because I very much believe in the power of personal narrative. Also, as a craft practitioner, I’m really interested in pushing back against the idea that personal narrative is somehow less work or less sculpted than other kinds of narrative. For me, as a writ- er, often it’s personal essays that I work on the longest, and often, the personal material is where it’s hardest to find the shape, the sculpture within the marble.

WEST 10TH: This question of shame is something you seem to return to and often grapple with in your work. I’m wondering if, for a writer, is experiencing shame crippling or productive? Does the “I” behind the personal essay necessarily feel some kind of shame?

JAMISON: I will just say anecdotally that I’m writing a book about addiction and recovery that I’ve been working on for seven years. It has twelve parts, and the fourth part is called “Shame.” At a certain point I did the math because I wanted to see, vaguely, how long the sections were in relation to each other, and the “Shame” section was twice as long as any other section. So, obviously, I’m still interested in shame. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that the “I” behind a person- al essay inevitably has some kind of shame attached to it. I do think shame can be a really rich signaling emotion insofar as it directs me towards experiences or aspects of my life that I have unresolved or often fraught or vexed feelings about. It’s almost always those kinds of experiences or memories that end up feeling meaningful to write about and that hold complexity. I was talking about it once with a friend of mine who’s a writer and we came up with this visual analogy for how a certain kind of shame works. If you imagine a thermal land- scape, like Yellowstone, where there’s geothermal activity, there will be little wisps of steam coming out from the ground, and sometimes shame feels like that. It’s those little wisps of steam that come up and I don’t necessarily know what’s producing them when I set out to write about something, but I’m following those signal flares in a way. It’s no accident that it’s a geothermal metaphor because heat is a way that I talk about energy in my writing, and definitely when I teach I talk about following material that seems to have heat in your first draft. So often the truth is that shame is produced by cultural forces and nar- ratives and expectations that make people feel ashamed about things they shouldn’t, so I think in investigating what shame attaches to there can be good work that can get done.

WEST 10TH: Going back to the idea of how you deliver your message in The Empathy Exams—when writing in a first-person situation, are you mindful of how you’re representing the “Leslie” in the work? Are you actively trying to represent yourself as someone who’s likeable? How are you supposed to represent yourself in order to deliver a mes- sage?

JAMISON: One of the trickiest things about nonfiction or personal narrative is that you are constructing yourself as a character on the page, but you, moment by moment, inhabit your identity. I’m inhab- iting myself constantly. I can’t see myself and I also see everything; I’m aware of everything I’ve ever lived even if I’m not consciously thinking about it all at once. And I know so much about myself that I have to kind of constantly forget myself in a way in order to see what self I have constructed on the page. I don’t do a lot of thinking, especially when I’m drafting, about how my character is emerging. I’m much more interested, usually, in the motivating questions behind my deployment of personal narrative. I think sometimes that comes in much more in the editing process, where I’m trying to be aware of every character I’ve constructed on the page in the same way I would be with fiction, and wanting for every character not necessarily like- ability but always complexity. Have I allowed myself to be complex or have I reduced myself to a set of thesis statements wrapped up in twine and made to be a person on the page? I think complexity is definitely a more guiding aspiration for me than likeability. I think, if anything, my tendencies as a writer probably move in the opposite direction. I’m more prone to making myself deeply unlikeable on the page and being very self-critical or extremely self-flagellating rather than self-promotional. I got a really interesting piece of feedback on a draft of this book I’ve been working on where he talked about how self-deprecation or self-laceration can feel like its own kind of con- trolling device—almost like, I’m going to judge myself on the page before you, reader, can judge me, or I’m going to judge myself so harshly that you can’t judge me. That was a really useful piece of feedback for me because it made me think about the ways in which things that feel like self-deprecation actually sometimes can operate as a kind of self-promotion or not leaving the reader enough space. And I think what I want in fiction and nonfiction, as a reader and a writer, is a work that can create room for complexity and multiplicity and ambiguity rather than pinning any character as too claustrophobically either good or bad or simple.

WEST 10TH: That relates to a question I had about representing oth- ers in nonfiction and the ethical implications of that. Does it ever feel exploitative to represent someone you’ve met in your life in a piece of writing?

JAMISON: That danger of exploitation or doing wrong by somebody— there’s never a moment when it’s not present. It’s always part of the process of writing nonfiction. And I really do think of it as a process rather than a choice. It’s not so much “Will you write about other people or not?” If you’re going to write nonfiction that’s not completely solipsistic, other people will be a part of your story. We live our stories in relation to other and we have essentially joint custody over a lot of our experiences. So I try to engage a process that does right by people, and that process looks different ways in relation to different kinds of people. If I’m working with someone as a journalist, the process looks like being as completely transparent and upfront as I can be from the outset. In this current book project, I did extensive interviews with four people in recovery who had all gone through a particular center in Maryland, and it was very important to me to include their stories precisely because I didn’t want to go really deep into stories of people I met in recovery because that would feel exploitative since we had met as people in recovery, not under the relationship of writer and subject. So I wanted to seek people out where I was being very clear: “I am a writer, I would like to include your story in my book, would you be comfortable with that? Under what terms would you feel com- fortable with that?” In terms of people who are a part of my life who then show up in the work, the process looks a bit different because obviously it’s not that I go inside every moment thinking I’m going to write about it. But I really do try, wherever possible, to show people the work well in advance of it coming out into the world so that we can have a dialogue about it. It’s not necessarily that I give people uni- lateral veto power, like they can strike whatever they want, it’s more that I try to go through the work of offering people the chance to read and be in conversation about it. Those conversations go all kinds of different ways. Sometimes they’re quite hard, sometimes they open up relationships in really wonderful ways. It’s not always that they’re a corrosive or destructive thing. This book includes a lot of narrative about a four-year relationship that I am not in any longer, and that former partner read a seven-hundred-page manuscript and we had a series of really long conversations about it. There are a bunch of different ways to do it—if you just write about somebody and put something out in the world and say look, there it is, to me that is very different ethically than approaching someone with the opportunity to be in dialogue about it. It’s just a lot of work, there’s a lot of leg work to it. You have to make sure you get the timing right so there’s space to have a conversation and space to edit based on that conversation, and being willing to engage in those conversations in the first place is a different kind of labor. Often, I think, it makes the work better rather than crippling the work because the narrative almost always becomes more complicated based on the feedback that the other person gives me about it.

WEST 10TH: I’m thinking about things I’ve written about my family, and showing them seems terrifying.

JAMISON: It is. But it’s almost like, the more I’m terrified, the more that is a signal to me that the last thing I should be doing is putting it out there without talking to them about it. I’m sure there are people who do it a different way, and I don’t mean to implicitly judge their process. And the truth is that you can’t always get somebody’s sanc- tion, and that’s the flip side of doing it the way I do it. I’ve had people say, “I just don’t want you to write about me.” And if you’ve asked them, you have to deal with the fact that if you go forward with it you can’t kid yourself that you’re doing it against their wishes. But I still think there’s something more honest about knowing where the person is at and then choosing to take them out of the story or knowing that you’re doing something against their preferences.

WEST 10TH: I know you’ve been alluding to it—I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit more about what you’re working on now.

JAMISON: I’m feeling in such an excited space about it. It’s called The Recovering and it’s coming out next fall and it’s about addiction and recovery and how we turn both of those into stories. My story is part of it, the stories of various other authors who have been in recovery are also a part of it, and I spent a lot of time in different authors’ archives looking both at how they wrote about their addictions and also about how their recovery changed how they wanted their writing life to work and what they wanted their writing to be. I wanted to write a book that worked like a meeting in that my story was coming into contact with the stories of others, and I had to create a structural braid that would allow that to happen over the course of five hundred pages. But there’s another layer that’s a cultural history and thinking about how the story of addiction has been told in different ways in the last one hundred years in America. And it has been told in incredibly different ways—sometimes addiction is a disease someone needs to recover from, sometimes it’s a crime someone needs to be put in prison for ten years for doing—and so much of that is reflective of a systemic racism that has shown up in a thousand ways in American culture. The drug wars in the eighties are a huge example of that. I also look at how I’ve been able to tell the story of my addiction in certain ways that are very unavailable to other people, and what are the cultural scripts that surround how I relate to my own pain or how I relate to my addiction as an expression of pain. So there’s a personal thread, a literary thread, a cultural thread, and then this reported thread that is a series of stories that all cluster around one particular rehab center in Maryland that opened the same year Nixon launched his war on drugs in 1971. It was an example of the recovery model coming up against the punishment model. I’m really excited about it, but it also took me so long to write it and wrestle with it because there was end- less research, and the structural question of how to bring the strands together also felt really endless. It feels good to finally have reached a shape for it.

Leslie Jamison was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Los Angeles. Since then, she’s lived in Iowa, Nicaragua, New Haven, and New York. She’s worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. She’s written a novel, The Gin Closet, and a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams. Her work has appeared or will appear in places like Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. She is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review and an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.