2019-11-01 In The Moment

CalmMoment.com 93

book club

CalmMoment.com 93

L

eslie Jamison’s first essay collection was

he Empathy Exams, released in 201 4. That

time, she started in the personal with the

staggering title essay, then shifted her gaze towards

external subjects. In Make it Scream, Make it Burn

the journey is reversed: she begins with other

people’s stories, and gradually turns focus onto

herself. But that makes it sound like the boundary

between self and other, observer and observed, is

ever something simple. Jamison’s subject, the

question she keeps returning to, is how contact

transforms every party in the encounter. She writes

that “every relationship is a collaboration”, and she

means absolutely every relationship – romantic,

parental, even our connection with nature.

So the opening essay here is the eerie, beautiful

‘5 2 Blue’. This is the story of the loneliest whale in the

world, the only one of its kind. But really, it’s the story

of the people who see themselves in 5 2 Blue: those

“who identified with the whale or hurt for him, ached

with whatever set of feelings they projected onto

him”. Elsewhere, we meet the obsessive residents of

the platform Second Life, where Jamison explores the

“fierce exchange” between the digital and physical;

parents who fervently believe their children have past

lives; and a photographer who has been documenting

the same family for thirty years, “obsessed with the

elusive horizon of a complete gaze”.

A callow writer would have made a freakshow of

these many and varied subjects, but Jamison is not

that: generous in her sympathy and probing in her

intellect, she wants to recognise not the strangeness

of these phenomena, but their specificity. It helps that

her writing is extraordinarily precise, rendering both

the extraordinary and the everyday as equally

transparent, equally miraculous. In an essay on

becoming a stepmother, she writes: “Love is effort and

desire” – an impeccably Jamison-esque sentiment.

There are no easy answers here, only the complicated

beauty of the truth.

Make it Scream,

Make it Burn

In her latest essay collection,

Leslie Jamison examines how

relationships are an act of collaboration

Words: Sarah Ditum

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