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Leslie Jamison

Biography

Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison is the author of the memoir SPLINTERS; the New York Times bestsellers THE RECOVERING and THE EMPATHY EXAMS; the collection of essays MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; and the novel THE GIN CLOSET, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She writes for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the New York Times, Harper’s and the New York Review of Books. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.

Leslie Jamison

Books by Leslie Jamison

by Leslie Jamison - Memoir, Nonfiction

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once --- a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover --- Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.

by Leslie Jamison - Essays, Nonfiction

In its kaleidoscopic sweep, MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN creates a profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession. Among Leslie Jamison's subjects are 52 Blue, deemed "the loneliest whale in the world"; the eerie past-life memories of children; the devoted citizens of an online world called Second Life; the haunted landscape of the Sri Lankan Civil War; and an entire museum dedicated to the relics of broken relationships. Jamison follows these examinations to more personal reckonings --- with elusive men and ruptured romances, with marriage and maternity --- in essays about eloping in Las Vegas, becoming a stepmother and giving birth.

by Leslie Jamison - Cultural Studies, Memoir, Nonfiction

Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction --- both her own and others' --- and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill. At the heart of the book is Jamison's ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence --- including Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace --- as well as brilliant lesser-known figures, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here.

by Leslie Jamison - Cultural Studies, Essays, Nonfiction

Drawing  from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, Leslie Jamison’s essays span wide-ranging territory --- from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration --- in their search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.