Leslie Jamison is Waiting For the Emergence of a Different World
From the Thresholds Podcast, Hosted by Jordan Kisner
This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the new essay collection, Thin Places, and brought to you by Lit Hub Radio.
In our seventh and last episode of the season, Leslie Jamison discusses her recent essay collection Make It Scream, Make It Burn, the experience of being alone with her daughter during the quarantine, and the stories we tell ourselves to keep our lives manageable.
From the interview:
Leslie Jamison: One thing that I’ve found to be true about quarantine—and I wonder if you’ve experience some version of this as well—is the overpresence of the past because the present is stripped away. I’ve always been a creature of the past. I’ve always felt flooded and hounded and haunted by memory, but I found that it’s almost like present experience quieting down has left this room, that the past has come into to flood and all the objects in that home are almost literal instantiation of that all around you.
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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.
