beauty of mundanity. In her nonfic-
tion debut, The Empathy Exams,
she drew on her experiences as
a patient instructor to sweepingly
consider how we relate to one
another; her 2018 addiction memoir,
The Recovering, studied the recovery
narrative as vitally American. (Both
books were New York Times best-
sellers.) Now she returns with Make
It Scream, Make It Burn, an essay
collection about longing. It proves
those comparisons to Joan Didion
and Susan Sontag were no fluke.
Here Jamison reports on unusual
obsessions before finding the
essential humanity within them. One
essay follows players of the digital
virtual world Second Life seeking
meaning in their alternate identities,
like a mother of four who wakes
up at 5:30 a.m. to “inhabit a life in
which she has the luxury of never
getting out of bed.” Another visits
the Museum of Broken Relationships,
a real place in Croatia displaying
artifacts from romantic breakups.
Jamison always writes in the first
person, as present as her subjects;
the reader is skeptical, enlightened,
and moved right along with her.
‟I want to pull away from the objective,
impersonal stance of the reporter,”
she explains, ‟to say, ‛This reporter
is also somebody who’s stuck in an
airport hotel in Houston.’ ”
Make It Scream begins with ‟52
Blue,” first published in 2014 on Ata-
vist, in which Jamison explores the
phenomenon of a whale whose song,
registered at a very high 52 hertz,
inspired a ‟rallying cry,” with people
across the globe projecting feelings
of loneliness and grief onto it. One
woman found such hope in its story,
she credits it with saving her life. (She
was very ill at the time.) She tells Les-
lie, ‟I hope they never find the whale,”
echoing a question Jamison returns
to later in the book: ‟Why do we like
things better when they’re far away?”
Her answer, now, is a little earnest,
but she’s fine with it. ‟Being surprised
by life, by weird forms of connection
and refuge...feels at the core of the
book,” she says. ‟You might find sol-
ace in the mythic figure of a lonely
whale, or a rooftop garden in a digital
wonderland.” Or hey, maybe a long
wait in the supermarket line.‟YOU SHOULD WRITE AN ESSAY
about that.”
Leslie Jamison hears the sugges-
tion from her mother all the time.
‟It’s with everything I go through,”
the author admits. ‟Even if it’s just,
like, that time I was waiting in the
supermarket line for a while.” Coziedup on said mother’s living-room sofa
in Santa Monica, Jamison, 36, is
laughing to herself considering this
‟advice.” Perhaps because there’s
a greater kernel of truth there than
she’d like to admit. Indeed, Jamison
has emerged as a definitive chron-
icler of human connection and theHuman
She’s OnlyShe’s been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag.
And with a brilliant new collection that rigorously interro-
gates the human condition, LESLIE JAMISON affirms
why she’s the essayist of the moment. BY DAVID CANFIELD↑ Jamison writes
from the notion
that “every life is
interesting.”