Leslie Jamison, "Make It Scream, Make It Burn"

Leslie Jamison discusses her book, "Make It Scream, Make It Burn", at Politics and Prose.

With The Empathy Exams and The Recovering—her deeply considered studies of suffering and addiction—Jamison proved herself a writer as compassionate as she is fearless. In the fourteen wide-ranging essays of her new collection, she employs a mix of memoir, criticism, and journalism to examine themes of memory and connection. Writing with her signature intellectual and emotional honesty, Jamison explores the war-scarred Sri Lankan landscape, the whale known as 52 Blue, the citizens of the online world Second Life, and a museum of the ephemera of relationships, as well as reflecting on her own past romances, marriage, motherhood, and step-motherhood.

Jamison is in conversation with Casey Cep, author of "Furious Hours".

Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, and the novel The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

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Produced by Tom Warren