MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN

Essays

By Leslie Jamison

Pity the personal essayist, fated to play with a reader’s tolerance for that most cursed of vowels. Too many “I”s and you’re self-absorbed; too few and: Where are you in this piece? Perhaps no other writer of her generation has wrestled with this conundrum more than Leslie Jamison. Her breakout collection, “The Empathy Exams,” deftly explored the balance between the inward and outward gaze and the intersection of the body’s frailty with the mind’s analytical prowess. (Her memoir, “The Recovering,” is also laden with spins and chills.)

Her second collection, “Make It Scream, Make It Burn,” is composed almost entirely of previously published pieces, an occupational hazard that can make the reader feel as if she’s wandered into a party to which she wasn’t invited. Taking a note from Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” the book is divided into three sections: Longing (studies in “only connect”), Looking (criticism and travel) and Dwelling (personal excavation). Across all three, Jamison’s journalistic battle between sentiment and detachment rages on, sometimes resulting in texture, sometimes in tedium.

Without question, Jamison has impeccable taste in her own ideas, selecting fringe subjects and following them to the end of the road. “52 Blue” explores the cult of personality around a lonely whale onto which people project their own trauma. Jamison has a habit of evoking champion point-makers (Janet Malcolm, Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace) to punctuate her own thoughts, but “52 Blue” contains one of the less obvious examples, that of the amateur astronomer Percival Lowell, who “claimed to have seen canals on Mars and shadowy ‘spokes’ on Venus. … An optometrist figured out that the settings on Lowell’s telescope — its magnification and narrow aperture — meant that it was essentially projecting the interior of his eye. He wasn’t seeing other life; he was seeing the imprint of his own gaze.” Elsewhere, “Sim Life” takes a deep dive into the game Second Life and its devotees, who have a “sense of not being fully included in the world.” “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Again” (the title is a welcome flash of humor) opens with the story of a little boy convinced he is a “pilot shot down by the Japanese” during World War II. The essay goes on to uncover the world of “children who claimed to remember prior lives.”