The eleven essays in this book all explore pain, in one way or another (or sometimes in several ways). All are well-written, some are structurally interesting, and I really liked some of them. The title essay, which is partly about Jamison’s job as a medical actor (presenting the symptoms of a disease/the story of a fictional patient to med school students conducting simulated examinations) is really satisfying: Jamison talks about her experience with the med students when she’s acting, and also about her experiences with empathy or lack thereof around the abortion she had and the heart surgery she had, and also about her feelings around empathy when her brother had Bell’s palsy. (This essay appeared in The Believer, and you can read the whole thing online here.) I love this, which is from that first essay: “Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see” (5). Also, this: “Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough” (17).
The second essay, which is about Morgellons (read it here) was also really interesting. Jamison writes about going to an annual conference in Austin for self-described “morgies,” and the weirdness of wanting to be empathetic/believing in the pain of the people she meets, without necessarily believing in some of their explanations for it. The travel/place-themed essays in this book (like one about going to a writers’ conference in Mexicali and hearing about/thinking about the experience of living in parts of Mexico that are very affected by the violence of the drug trade, or about getting mugged/punched in Nicaragua, or about visiting the silver mines of Potosí, or going on a “Gang Tour” in LA) didn’t resonate as strongly with me, and I’m not sure why, though there are interesting bits. I did love The Immortal Horizon, which is about the Barkley Marathons, a 100+-mile race over very rough/wild terrain in Tennessee, in which Jamison’s brother competed in 2010.
The book’s last essay, which is about female pain, seems to be one of those things people either really like or really don’t (based on the Goodreads reviews I’ve seen, anyway), but I felt conflicted. There were parts of it I liked because Jamison is around my age, and I relate to passages like this, because these are the song lyrics of my adolescence, too:
I grew up under the spell of damaged sirens: Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, Björk, Kate Bush, Mazzy Star. They sang about all the ways a woman could hurt: I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl. When they’re out for blood I always give. We are made to bleed and scab and heal and bleed again and turn every scar into a joke. Boy you best pray that I bleed real soon. Bluffing your way into my mouth, behind my teeth, reaching for my scars. Did I ever tell you how I stopped eating, when you stopped calling? You’re only popular with anorexia. Sometimes you’re nothing but meat, girl. I’ve come home. I’m so cold. (202)
And she quotes Anne Carson, which always wins points with me, and I like the way the essay brings together all these different bits and pieces (a female character in Dickens, Lena Dunham’s Girls, Stephen King’s Carrie, and more), and I like the idea of “the possibility of representing female suffering without reifying its mythos” (214). But I have issues with the gender binary, which this essay doesn’t really question, and I think maybe part of the problem with “female pain” is failing, in some cases, to see pain as an individual issue/experience, not in a gendered way (which I think Jamison gets at, right at the end of the essay, but not enough).
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