Leslie Jamison

The contents of this book are remarkably difficult to describe. Well, all right, no, it's easy enough to describe: it's a series of personal essays all of which, in some manner, deal with the subjects of human suffering and human empathy. But I'm not sure saying that gives you a good idea of what to expect at all. Partly that's because the specifics of the subject matter are so varied. The author talks about her personal experiences, including having an abortion and being punched in the nose show more during a mugging. She tours places dense with misery and observes not just her surroundings, but her own reactions. She describes a job she had pretending to be a patient for doctors in training and rating them, in part, on how much empathy they displayed, and then talks about attending a conference for people who are certain they are suffering from a disease doctors don't believe actually exists. And so on.

Some of these essays struck me as better than others, but at they're best they're amazing: lyrically written and insightful in a way that sometimes made me want to gasp. And if sometimes it borders on the self-indulgent, well, that in itself just provides more to talk about, as Jamison thoughtfully considers what it means for her to write about her own pain or her perceptions of others' pain, and widens that self-reflection out to consider complex questions about not just empathy, but about what we mean when we accuse someone of wallowing in their own pain and in what contexts we make those kinds of judgments. And for all that she talks about herself a lot, there seems to me to be a laudable kind of humility in her willingness to constantly re-examine and question her own feelings and her own responses. The result isn't always easy to read, but I found it very much worth it. show less

In this second collection of Leslie Jamison's essays, she writes about a variety of subjects, some very personal and some less so -- although her own perspective and thoughts are always very much part of the story. There's a piece about the virtual environment Second Life, and one about an unusual whale that humans can't resist projecting themselves onto in various ways. There is an essay that's partly about Las Vegas and partly about two very different romantic relationships in Jamison's show more life. There's one about fairy tales and the experience of being a stepmother. There are a couple that are extended looks at the works of others (James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the photography of Annie Appel, who kept returning to take pictures of the same Mexican family for decades), which I didn't find nearly as compelling as Jamison writing about her own experiences, but which were certainly still good. There are essays about pregnancy and eating disorder and Civil War photographs, and a museum in Croatia dedicated to mementos of failed relationships. So it covers rather a lot of ground, although in ways that somehow manage to make it all feel emotionally or thematically connected.

I do think, overall, this didn't wow me quite as much as her earlier collection The Empathy Exams did, although that might simply be because I had a better idea of what to expect from this volume and it took me less by surprise. That's a very high bar to meet, in any case, and no matter what kind of comparisons I might or might not draw, Jamison does very much continue to prove here that she's a damned good writer. I am deeply impressed by her honesty, and by the way she thoughtfully reflects on things and then reflects on her own reflections in ways that, in the hands of a lesser writer, could feel like self-absorbed navel-gazing, but instead feel to me as if they express something deeply profound and recognizable about the experience of being human. Even when I find myself disagreeing with her -- and I definitely wanted to argue some points in the essay she wrote about children who supposedly remember past lives, if nowhere else -- I always felt a very real respect and appreciation for her and her writing. show less

Sometimes you pick up a book and it ends up being one of those truly amazing pieces of writing, the kind you wish you could have created when you were in your early twenties with college-angst. The kind professors yearn for and literary critics swoon over. Leslie Jamison makes me green with writers-envy. Her ability to take a string of simple words and turn them into a profound sentence blew me away on (what felt like) every page.

On the material surface, The Gin Closet is a novel about two show more women, one trying to find herself, one trying to survive. When Stella learns she has an estranged aunt she packs up her meaningless New York City existence and moves to the desert to help this broken woman cope with alcoholism and loneliness. Tilly is a mess, she seems to only hurt the people around her and has been that way she since she was young. She hasn’t had an easy life so when Stella turns up Tilly surfaces from her gin-induced waking-coma to think of the life she could possibly have, a life that means something, a life near her son in San Francisco. Together, Stella and Tilly embark on a trip, not a journey to somewhere even though they have a destination; more a sort of movement, fumbling many times along the way.

Told from both women’s first-person points of view, Stella is damaged, and Tilly is lost. The dueling narratives juxtapose these women, and give the reader a unique sense of being each of them, as well as watching each of them. This is a novel about family paradigms, but more specifically, female family paradigms: what it means to be a mother, a daughter, or a sister; what we do to our family and what is done to us. Jamison draws a true, poignant portrait of the dichotomy between female relations.

The Gin Closet is about the things we live with and survive through. How we perceive the one body we are given and what we choose to do with, and to, our life. What definitions do we place upon ourself? Anorexic, Alcoholic, Loner, Dreamer? What do we make of the people around us? Stella expects to be used, expects to be abandoned, but she is hardened and does the same to others. Tilly pushes everyone away until she decides to pull them close, but too close.

A beautiful, heartbreaking portrait of the female soul, a novel with an exquisite use of language, Leslie Jamison’s debut is remarkable in its simplistic truth. She doesn’t pander to the audience, she doesn’t mince words, she’s obvious but understated. Like Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping, or Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, The Gin Closet is unsettling but utterly remarkable. show less

Brilliant, searching, insightful, humble, funny, moving, interesting, provocative. Jamison probes the mythology surrounding the alcoholic writer, points out the differences in critical and cultural approval between the genders, unearths fascinating stories and reflections from writers (and other artists, like Billie Holiday), faces down the fear of losing creative courage in recovery, grapples with the use of clichés, wrestles with the desire for uniqueness and the healing power of common show more stories, sheds new light on the power of stories (which I didn't know could still be done)...and whenever I felt like she may go for quick conclusions or opt for easy inspirational messages, she would pull back (or move deeper) to come up with something much more real and profound. I had to be consciously disciplined about highlighting passages or the whole book would have been in color. I have very few five-star books in my list. Here, it is well-deserved. show less