Could Leslie Jamison please stop sitting on the fence?

Leslie Jamison is creating quite a stir in America. Her first collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, went straight to the New York Times bestseller list, and this second collection comes crowned in laurels: ‘She’s an unstoppable force of nature,’ says her American editor. ‘This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best,’ says Eleanor Catton. Stephen King calls her ‘required reading’, and early reviewers on the website Goodreads describe this book as ‘genius’, ‘astounding’, ‘resplendent’ and ‘epiphanic’.

Because she is a woman who writes essays, Jamison has been compared with Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm and Susan Sontag, but she is the antithesis of her predecessors. A recovered alcoholic, Jamison speaks the lingo of sharing, gratitude and moral righteousness (in her acknowledgements she thanks those friends ‘who simply helped me survive my own life’). She trades in platitudes, believes that scepticism contains an ‘ethical failure’, and ‘has doubts about doubt’. As an ‘expression of kinship and curiosity’ with the world, she has the words ‘Nothing human is alien to me’ tattooed on her arm.