Leslie Jamison: Park Slope's Bestselling Essayist
Updated: Oct 7
A note from our founder
Our twelfth tribute in this new chapter goes to a writer who turned rigorous self-examination into some of the most acclaimed nonfiction of her generation. Leslie Jamison writes from Park Slope, and her work has a rare habit of debuting at the top of the bestseller list.
An Accomplished Education
Leslie Jamison was born on June 21, 1983, in Washington, D.C., and raised in Los Angeles, California, into an accomplished family — she is the niece of psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison. She graduated from Harvard University, earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and later completed a PhD in English literature at Yale University.
The Empathy Exams
Jamison arrived at mainstream literary fame with her 2014 collection The Empathy Exams, which debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Her writing is defined by a rigorous, fearless interrogation of empathy, addiction, recovery, bodily pain, and modern womanhood, blending deeply personal, vulnerable memoir with sharp cultural criticism and long-form investigative journalism.
A Career in Essays and Fiction
Jamison's work has been widely anthologized and appears regularly in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, and The New Yorker. She previously directed the nonfiction concentration in the MFA program at Columbia University. She lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her family.
Bibliography
Non-Fiction & Essays
The Empathy Exams (2014) — Her breakout collection of essays exploring the boundaries of human sympathy, beginning with her own experiences working as a medical actor pretending to have ailments for medical students.
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (2018) — A monumental, deeply researched blend of memoir, literary criticism, and journalistic history that looks at the cultural myth of the creative addict alongside her own journey toward sobriety.
Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019) — An eclectic essay collection exploring the obsessions that haunt people, covering everything from the virtual world of Second Life to children who remember past lives, juxtaposed with her own shifting life phases.
Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story (2024) — A searingly honest memoir chronicling the simultaneous heartbreak of a crumbling marriage and the fierce, overwhelming joy of early motherhood.
Fiction
The Gin Closet (2010) — Her debut novel, tracking the intense, frayed relationship between a young New York corporate worker and her estranged, alcoholic aunt living in a trailer in Nevada.
READ JAMISON
Start with The Empathy Exams for the book that made her name, or The Recovering if you'd rather begin with her most ambitious work. Either way, you're reading a writer who examines her own life as unflinchingly as she examines anyone else's. Get the book.
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