R10 | ARTS OTHEGLOBEANDMAIL | SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2019
L
eslie Jamison’s incisive, in-
sightful writing on the hu-
man condition has earned
her comparisons to celebrated
authors such as Susan Sontag and
Joan Didion. Her 2014 essay col-
lection,The Empathy Exams, ex-
plored topics such as the myste-
rious Morgellons disease, the
West Memphis Three and a
“Grand Unified Theory of Female
Pain,” while her 2018 tomeThe Re-
coveringpoignantly examined the
intersection of addiction and cre-
ativity, telling her own recovery
story alongside those of celebrat-
ed artists. Her latest,Make It
Scream, Make It Burn, plumbs the
depths of obsession, haunting
and longing with stories about
Zagreb, Croatia’s Museum of Bro-
ken Relationships, past lives, Sec-
ond Life, her own life and “the
loneliest whale in the world,”
among others. With a tender
hand, Jamison illuminates the
monumental effect that yearning
has on our lives – how it shapes
us, what it says about the ways we
connect with others and how we
might learn to reckon with it.
One of the things I love most about
this book is that you drive home
the idea that some kind of final
resolution or closure is often un-
attainable. There isn’t an end to
yearning – it’s part of the deal.
When did your thinking shift to-
ward this perspective?
I guess I’ve been obsessed with
ongoingness in some way for my
whole life. I can’t remember a
time before I had this deep yearn-
ing for closure and completeness.
But the flip side of that yearning
for closure and completeness, I
think, is this constant awareness
of how impossible they are. Be-
cause I actually have a type-A per-
sonality. I was just joking with my
friend the other night that I feel
like I have a very antsy, artistic
temperament, especially now
that I’m sober. If you could see me
now at my desk, you would see
me trying to create a very meticu-
lous to-do list so that I can cross
everything off of it. I do actually
yearn to be done in some way,
and try to control chaos in all
these ways in my life. But I think
that urge for completion or that
urge for total order is constantly
coming up against my awareness
that most of life is full of things
that will never be completed, like
relationships or yearnings or
forms of intimacy with other peo-
ple, whether those forms of in-
timacy are ongoing in a relation-
ship or just ongoing as a kind of
internal conversation. Which is
so much of what “Museum of
Broken Hearts” is trying to get at –
even once a relationship is done,
it’s still living inside you in some
way. So, I think my obsession
with ongoingness is always in
conversation with a craving for
completion inside of me, and that
tension is always alive more than
either side getting to win out.The book also solidifies this idea
that it’s okay to be in that spot
where you can’t avoid both craving
resolution and understanding it’s
never going to happen. I think a lot
of our tension ends up coming
from not being able to achieve that
resolution. I know it’s a shift in my
own thinking that I’ve only been
able to manage in the past couple
years. But it feels like magic – you
can have a better understanding of
relationships and practise patience
better because you know everyone
else is going through the same
thing.I heard somebody say the other
day – they attributed it to Plato,
who didn’t say this, but I think
there’s something that’s even
more moving about misattribut-
ed quotes. My tattoo initially
came to me as a misattributed
quote. They said, “As Plato said,
everyone you meet is fighting a
great battle.” And it wasn’t Plato
who said it, I think it was some
19th-century Scottish minister.
But I love it and I love that people
want Plato to have said it. I mean,
I talk about it all the time. It
shows up in that David Foster
Wallace commencement speech
that I reference in one of the es-
says, too, this idea that the annoy-
ing person in front of you at the
supermarket is fighting a great
battle. I think that’s kind of chee-
sy, but it’s so true. And how in-
stantaneously do we forget it.
And how important to try to
come back to it.So – why haunting and obsession?
Was there a connecting path from
addiction and recovery?Maybe it has to do with this idea
of ongoingness. Because when
you initially asked that question
about the way this interest in
things that can’t be completed or
living in that state of incomple-
tion is at the core of the collec-
tion, I think that’s really true. One
of the places my mind went to is
definitely sobriety and how – as I
write about inThe Recoveringand
people talk about a lot in recov-
ery – the fantasy of your sobriety
being done isn’t possible, because
as long as you’re alive, your so-
briety is this open-ended thing
and you just have to keep living it.
You never check it off the list. So I
think there is something about
addiction and recovery that
brings up that idea of ongoing-
ness and this story that can’t
quite ever have an end. That defi-
nitely fed into the interest in
open-endedness that shows up in
the concepts of obsession, be-
cause you keep chasing a thing;
longing, you’re yearning toward
something you can’t quite have;
haunting, you’re still obsessed
with it even once it’s gone.
They’re all about ongoingness in
some way. So, in that sense I think
they do come pretty organically
from the way that my writing
about recovery and sobriety is al-
so interested in ongoingness.What’s haunting you right now?I was recently having a conversa-
tion with a friend of mine, and we
were talking about the predica-
ment of being self-aware people
in this world. She said, “I think
when you’re super self aware, it
can be harder to stay awake or
open to the things you don’t yet
know about yourself.”
Ever since we had that conver-
sation, I’ve really been carrying
that question around. “What do I
not yet know about myself?” Be-
cause I think self-awareness or
self knowledge can become this
kind of trap where you think, “I
understand myself.” But then
that self-understanding hardens
you in a way. I’ve become really
interested in that. What are the
ways that I’m going to surprise
myself over the next decade? Or
handle things in a different way
than I had told myself I always
did? There’s this big new biogra-
phy of Susan Sontag coming out
this month and I wrote an essay
about it for a magazine down
here in the States. Sontag was sort
of living out the same psychodra-
mas over and over again in her
personal life – I mean, aren’t we
all? But I think there was some-
thing about the claustrophobic
stranglehold that her inner de-
mons had on her, and reading an
800-page biography where you
see them playing out over and
over again made me think, “God,
I wish she had had more of that
experience of, ‘What do I not yet
know about myself?’ ” Rather
than being in the loop. So, yes –“What do I not yet know about
myself?” is my answer to that
question.It’s a good one, and reminds me – I
feel I’ve made it to a place where
my artistic practice is aesthetically
defined, and that feels good. But
when I dwell on it, there’s a big
part of me that thinks, “I want to
burn that down completely.”I was just having a different con-
versation with another friend last
night where she was talking
about something quite related to
that impulse to want to burn it
down, about the fact people can
be so quick to extol the virtues of
self-acceptance, but there’s ac-
tually a kind of stasis or a dead-
ening in self-acceptance. And a
kind of loss, where we’re always
living with the companions of
these possible, hypothetical ver-
sions of ourselves, and self-ac-
ceptance involves almost killing
off this possible other self you
could be, because you’re just ac-
cepting the self that you are. I
thought that was so smart and I
was like, “Oh right. There’s some-
thing about dissatisfaction that is
generative and alive.” “Make it
scream” obviously comes from
the William Carlos Williams re-
view of Walker Evans’s photogra-
phy. But that may be part of what
“make it burn” is suggesting: that
idea of perpetual reinvention, al-
ways burning something down
and building it up again.There’s a part of your essay about
The Division of Perceptual Studies
where you mentioned that you’ve
become skeptical of knee-jerk
skepticism itself. When and how
did that happen for you? Because
to me, throughTheEmpathyEx-
amsandTheRecovering,itoften
felt like that was a defining charac-
teristic of your work – that willing-
ness to believe despite the odds.In some ways, I think I’ve always
had the soul of a believer or an
embracer or an agnostic. I think
that’s where my temperament
naturally wants to go. I’m inter-
ested in states of curiosity and
wonder and enthusiasm. They
feel more generative to me. But
it’s almost like that natural dispo-
sition was submerged for many
years in my teens and 20s because
I think I just felt too insecure. I felt
too vulnerable and too unsure of
myself to be an enthusiast or an
agnostic or a believer. Certainly,
something like cliché, that would
be true for. I was too insecure to
try to mount a defence of clichés
until I had arrived at enough of a
sense of self that I could risk be-
ing somebody who might stand
behind things. So, in a way, I’ve
never really thought about this
before or articulated it like this
before, but I think it’s right or part
of the truth, anyway – it’s almost
like I had to do a certain amount
of work to find a footing or confi-
dence in the world that would al-
low me to embrace rather than
paper over this natural impulse
to, rather than dismiss things,
think about what was beautiful or
meaningful inside of them.SpecialtoTheGlobeandMailLeslieJamison’sconstantcraving
Authorexplores
theunattainable
yearningforclosure
andcompletenessin
herlatestcollection
MATT WILLIAMS
Leslie Jamison uses the stories in her latest collection, Make It Scream,
Make it Burn, to illuminate the monumental effect that yearning has on
our lives.BEOWULFSHEEHANTHIS
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AUTHOR
LAST
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