Leslie Jamison

Addiction is seemingly inexplicable. From the outside, it can look like wilful, arrogant self-destruction; from the inside, it can feel as inevitable and insistent as a heartbeat. It is possible to describe, but hard to explore. Yet in The Recovering, Leslie Jamison draws on her own life and the lives of addicts of …

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeA Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, …

In this blend of memoir and criticism, Leslie Jamison turns her attention to some of the most intimate relationships of her life - her consuming love for her young daughter, and a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope - and examines what it means for a woman to be many things at once: a mother, an artist, a …