Fabulous Five Friday: Five Great Essay Collections

 Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion

There is no denying that Didion is the queen of the essay form. Bethlehem is one of her earliest collections, but it’s still my favorite. Though some might find the essays rooted in the current events of the 1960s a bit dated, her personal essays are timeless. Some of her best known pieces come from this collection, like “On Keeping a Notebook,” “On Self-Respect,” and “On Going Home.”

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman is a book person after my own heart, only smarter and more articulate. Each essay looks at a personal experience with reading, like learning to love reading by watching her parents, or her family’s obsession with finding errors in their books. Her whole family is bookish and weird and really fun to read about.

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

This collection is not so much a direct analysis of feminism as it is simply a collection of Gay’s pieces from all over the internet. She focuses so much on feminism, directly and indirectly, that the title is still pretty spot-on. The essays cover everything from the day-to-day struggle of being a POC in academia to what it’s like to compete in a Scrabble tournament. Her pop culture criticism is both incisive and highly personal, which something I strive for in my own criticism and she makes for a fantastic teacher.

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

This collection got a lot of buzz when it came out, and for good reason. Jamison writes highly personal essays on the experience of empathy in a style that seems meandering but always comes together in perfect but surprising ways.

Paris Was Ours: Thirty-Two Writers Reflect on the City of Light edited by Penelope Rowlands

Writers—some famous, some less so—write about visiting or living in modern Paris. The different voices and experiences each capture something unique about the city and about what it’s like to be in a famous place that contains so many contradictions. Like with all anthologies, I found some more interesting than others, but none were disappointing.

On the cover of my edition of The Empathy Exams, by Lesli Jamison, Mary Karr says that the book will make its readers better people. This is not true. I’m not a better person for having read it. A couple of the members of my book club declared that they weren’t improved by reading it. Then our conversation veered into the very short list of books that might actually have changed us. The Empathy Exams does explore how we feel when we witness others in pain or in turmoil, but it’s a very academic exploration...

Read the rest of A Bookish Type.

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

In this book of essays, author Leslie Jamison explores empathy in all it's many forms - physically, emotionally; real, imagined. She does this with smart prose, philosophical questions, true to her life stories, and literary criticism of other essayists from Dideon and Agee, to Karr and Grealy.

I totally got sucked into this book after reading just a few pages, and I must admit here that through this book, I alluded time through reading. I also found myself highlighting A LOT, so I just wanted to share with you two of my most favorite quotes:

"Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges.Trauma bleeds out of wounds and across boundaries."

"Empathy is a choice we make to pay attention, to extend ourselves."

 

 

I think that this book should be required reading for every person on this planet. I feel as society becomes more self absorbed we lose empathy towards each other and our struggles; which are basically the same for everyone, they just show up in different ways.

I choose to live life with an open heart and practice empathy on a daily basis. Please say that you will join me.

Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.