Review: Make It Scream, Make It Burn

4/5 stars

Make It Scream, Make It Burn, by Leslie Jamison (2019)

One of my favorite nonfiction books is Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams - a collection of essays that examine the act of empathy across different situations and backdrops, often incorporating some vulnerable aspect of her own personal story. She talks about the American prison system, the Barkley Marathon (a quirky and brutal race that few are able to complete), a rare disease that many claim is just a delusion, poverty tourism, Jamison's work as a medical actor, and more.

In Make It Scream, Jamison continues the conversation with deep dives that fall into three overall chapter headings - Longing, Looking, and Dwelling. Her stories here are about loneliness, graciousness, nostalgia, obsession, loss, and change - and how her personal relationships through the years have each centered around one or more of these. In "52 Blue" she tells the story of a lone whale with an unusual underwater call, that people have connected to emotionally because of it's singularity. In "the Real Smoke" she talks about Las Vegas - the honesty that comes with acknowledging the fakeness of everything, and being swept away by the glitz and glam of the town, of a new love affair, of something promised but never received. In "The Museum of Broken Relationships" she chronicles her visit to an abstract gallery in Croatia, where people submit items that remind them of their losses - whether by tragedy, misunderstanding, or the just plain wrong-place-wrong-time kinds of missed opportunities that may haunt someone.

The latter third of the book begins to focus a bit more on her own personal story, which, to be honest, I found a little less compelling. She frequently refers to her past failed relationships and the mistakes she made in them - but her musings feel less introspective, and more whiney and blaming, at times. It's hard to keep caring about the stories of someone who makes the same mistakes over and over - no matter how beautiful and eloquent the writing is. If you haven't read Jamison, I suggest you start with The Empathy Exams. That said, here are a few quotes from Make It Scream that I flagged:

On the complicated ways that art can be exploitative:

"What does it mean to make art from other people's lives? What distinguishes exploitation from witnessing, and when is that witnessing complete? Is it ever?

... I have spent much of my life as a writer chasing poet C.D. Wright's suggestion that we try to see people 'as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves.' But it's an impossible dream. Making art about other people always means seeing them as you see them, rather than mirroring the way they would elect to be seen."

On looking backwards at people you've lost:

"Nostalgia rearranges the rooms of memory: it makes the beds, puts a vase of flowers on the dresser, opens the curtains to let in the sun. It gets harder and harder to say, It was painful to live there. The voice of insistence goes faint: It was. Because we miss it. We miss what was hard about it. We miss it all."

On the female body, and society's expectations of it:

"It took me five or six months to show. Before that, people would say: "You don't look pregnant at all!" They meant it as a compliment. The female body is always praised for staying within its boundaries, for making even its sanctioned expansion impossible to detect."

On being kind, even when you don't want to be:

"Does graciousness mean you want to help - or that you don't, and do it anyway? The definition of grace is that it's not deserved. It does not require a good night's sleep to give it, or a flawless record to receive it. It demands no particular backstory... Sometimes a person needs help because she needs it, not because her story is compelling or noble or strange enough to earn it."

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UP NEXT: How to Solve Your Own Murder and How to Seal Your Own Fate, by Kristen Perrin