You\u2019re on the T. It\u2019s packed \u2013 you\u2019re probably on the redline. You\u2019re standing smack in the center of the human version of a sardine can, and if one more person accidentally elbows you, you are going to throw them under the tracks. The woman next to you keeps blowing her nose. You\u2019ve got two papers due next week and are stressed out enough without adding this lady’s sickness to the mix.<\/span><\/p>\n You wish you were anywhere but here.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But then maybe you notice that the nose-blower\u2019s eyes are red and her lip is trembling.\u00a0 She\u2019s not sick \u2013 she\u2019s been crying. Has someone died? Did she have a bad breakup? Lose her job? Stub her pinky toe? Suddenly, you feel something for this person that a short moment ago you wished was in a quarantine facility at least three miles away. It\u2019s not pity or even understanding, but it\u2019s something that makes you think about what it means to be alive and human. You get off the T a minute later, or maybe she leaves first; either way, she\u2019s gone now. You probably won\u2019t ever see her again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Leslie Jamison lives for moments like this.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n She\u2019s made her career out of recounting them, analyzing them, and dissecting them so we can see their mushy, metaphorically rich innards. She\u2019s predominantly known for her 2014 essay collection,\u00a0<\/span>The Empathy Exams<\/span><\/i>, in which she reflects on how she and others relate to each other in our complex misshapen glory. It\u2019s a brilliant book, and one of my favorites. I had to buy it for a class last semester, and though we were only supposed to read three essays in it, I quickly found myself completely enamored with not just the subject matter, but also her prose. It\u2019s direct, but lyrical; dense, but not in a pretentious way; it\u2019s magnetic; it simmers. I finished it the second class let out.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Make It Scream, Make It Burn<\/span><\/i>, her second essay collection and latest release, feels like a sibling to <\/span>The Empathy Exams<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>Make It Scream, Make It Burn<\/span><\/i> is still about what it means to relate to and be a person, but it zeros in on \u201cthe oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession,\u201d according to the dust jacket. Jamison\u2019s essays are always about specifics \u2013 a lonely whale and lonely people lonely people, a museum dedicated to breakups, becoming a stepmother, and Las Vegas and the sincerity of its kitsch \u2013 but she finds a way to make them about more than what they are. She fits them into a narrative about the self, a narrative about the world at large, and a narrative about narratives themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s what I love the most about this collection – her thoughts on how we turn real life into a story. It\u2019s something I do all the time. I romanticize and fixate on the idea of a person instead of the actuality of them, slot them into my life based on how I want them to relate to me, and don\u2019t let them breathe outside that role.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I want to scream because I want to be heard. I want to scream because I want to be cared for. And when I read Jamison, I know she understands this. Whenever I pick up one of her books, I feel like she\u2019s guiding me through a winding maze of my own feelings and thoughts, even though she\u2019s writing about her own personal experiences. She can\u2019t take me to the exit \u2013 I have to do that myself \u2013 but she gives me a map. Now it\u2019s up to me to decipher it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n If you\u2019ve ever related to another person before, you need to read this book. This is not a recommendation. This is an imperative. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ana Hein \/\/ Blog Writer You\u2019ve been in this scenario before.\u00a0 You\u2019re on the T. It\u2019s packed \u2013 you\u2019re probably on the redline. You\u2019re standing smack in the center of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-reading","category-opinion","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1502,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions\/1502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/81uuwO2I0vL.jpg\")
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