Recommendations
Books Like The Empathy Exams
Best books to read after The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
The Empathy Exams uses the essay form to investigate what it means to acknowledge another person's pain, moving between personal experience and cultural criticism with unusual precision and range. These 8 books share its formal ambition, its preoccupation with pain and its representation, and its willingness to place the writer inside the inquiry.
- 1Buy
The Argonauts
by Maggie Nelson
Nelson's 2015 autotheory memoir is the closest contemporary companion to The Empathy Exams — both use the hybrid essay-memoir form to do philosophical work through personal experience, both weave citation into autobiographical prose without distinguishing clearly between the two, and both are preoccupied with the ethics of representation and the limits of language.
- 2Buy
Bluets
by Maggie Nelson
Nelson's 240-proposition meditation on the color blue and the grief of heartbreak is a slightly earlier version of the same hybrid form that Jamison practices in The Empathy Exams — short, numbered meditations that accumulate meaning through repetition and variation rather than through conventional argument.
- 3Buy
Bad Feminist
by Roxane Gay
Gay's 2014 essay collection — published the same year as The Empathy Exams — approaches the same territory (the personal essay as cultural criticism, the female body and its representation, the difficulty of holding contradictory positions simultaneously) with Gay's characteristic directness and humor, and is the most natural companion on the bookshelf.
- 4Buy
I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
by Nadja Spiegelman
Spiegelman's 2016 memoir about intergenerational memory and the stories four generations of women in her family tell about their own childhoods shares The Empathy Exams' preoccupation with the gap between experience and its narration, and with what it costs to try to inhabit another person's perspective.
- 5Buy
In the Dream House
by Carmen Maria Machado
Machado's 2019 memoir about an abusive relationship with a woman — told through the genre conventions of folklore, horror, and choose-your-own-adventure — is formally the most inventive contemporary heir to Jamison's project: using genre and form to get at experiences that resist straightforward narration, with the same willingness to expose the self to critical scrutiny.
- 6Buy
Outline
by Rachel Cusk
Cusk's 2014 novel — the first in the Outline trilogy — consists almost entirely of what other people say to the narrator, Faye, making it a novel about the act of listening and its demands, about what it means to attend to another person's self-presentation, and about the extent to which identity is constructed through narrative — questions Jamison circles around in The Empathy Exams from the other direction.
- 7Buy
The Recovering
by Leslie Jamison
Jamison's 2018 memoir about alcoholism and recovery extends the formal and thematic territory of The Empathy Exams — it weaves her own story with a cultural and literary history of addiction writing (Malcolm Lowry, Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, John Berryman) and applies the same insistence on looking clearly at experience that characterizes the essay collection.
- 8Buy
On Immunity
by Eula Biss
Biss's 2014 essay-memoir about vaccination and the immune system — written in the wake of her son's birth and her encounter with parental anxiety about vaccines — shares The Empathy Exams' movement between personal experience and research, its willingness to hold uncertainty while making an argument, and its preoccupation with collective and individual vulnerability.
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