Question 1

What is the title essay of The Empathy Exams about?

Accepted Answer

The title essay opens the collection and describes Jamison's experience as a 'standardized patient' — a medical actor hired to portray patients with scripted symptoms for medical students learning to take histories and conduct examinations. Jamison used the experience to think about what empathy actually requires: whether it means feeling what another person feels (which may be impossible), or something more like the willingness to acknowledge that another person's pain is real and matters. The essay is also about her own experience as a patient having open-heart surgery for a cardiac condition, and about a boyfriend who was unsympathetic during that experience. The essay is both a philosophical investigation (drawing on thinkers from Adam Smith to Joanna Bourke) and a personal reckoning with the question of whether she herself is capable of the empathy she is asking for from others.

Question 2

What other essays are in The Empathy Exams?

Accepted Answer

The collection includes eleven essays ranging widely in subject and form. 'La Frontera' follows Jamison through a drug trial in Bolivia. 'Devil's Bait' investigates Morgellons disease — a controversial condition in which sufferers believe their skin is infested with fibers or parasites — and uses it to think about the relationship between believing and suffering. 'The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young' follows competitors in a nearly impossible ultra-endurance race in Tennessee. 'In Defense of Saccharin(e)' is about sentimentality and its dismissal in contemporary culture. 'The Immortal Horizon' is a second Barkley essay. 'Fog Count' visits a federal prison and interviews a man serving a long sentence. The collection's consistent preoccupation is the relationship between acknowledged and unacknowledged pain, and the ethics of representing suffering that is not one's own.

Question 3

How does The Empathy Exams compare to other recent essay collections?

Accepted Answer

The Empathy Exams belongs to a moment in American nonfiction writing in the 2010s that produced a number of highly personal, formally ambitious essay collections by women writers — including Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist (2014), Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015), Claudia Rankine's Citizen (2014), and Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House (2019). Like those books, Jamison's collection refuses to keep the personal and the intellectual separate, using the essay form to do philosophical work through the particular. What distinguishes Jamison is her particular preoccupation with pain and its acknowledgment — she returns again and again to the question of whose suffering gets recognized, who gets to be a sympathetic victim, and what it costs to ask for empathy. Her prose style is analytical and precise, with a willingness to turn the same scrutiny on herself that she applies to her subjects.

The Empathy Exams Reading Order

Complete The Empathy Exams Book List