“You should write an essay about that.”
Leslie Jamisonhears the suggestion from her mother all the time.
“It’s witheverythingI go through,” the author admits.
Perhaps because there’s a greater kernel of truth there than she’d like to admit.
Indeed, Jamison has emerged as a definitive chronicler of human connection and the beauty of mundanity.
(Both books wereNew York Timesbest-sellers.)
Now she returns withMake It Scream, Make It Burn, an essay collection about longing.
It proves those comparisons to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag were no fluke.
Another visits the Museum of Broken Relationships, a real place in Croatia displaying artifacts from romantic breakups.
EW spent an afternoon with Jamison at her mother’s home.
I was thinking about it… particularly acutely on this trip.
I should have arrived here in a tizzy about a bunch of things.
Something about salt air, a particular temperature.
It was like a John Cusack movie.
This is actually my idea of beauty: This city has trained me to find this vista singularly beautiful.
It feels good to be here.
[Gesturing to the galley] Let’s talk about this.It holds my whole heart.
It’s more like, I feel like I’ve given it what I can.
I’ve done what I can with those questions in this particular echo chamber of inquiries.
I’ll probably keep wrestling with those questions.
That mystery of “What does it feel like to be alive?
How do we ever understand what it feels like for another person to be alive?”
What was the editing process there?
You took your own presence in that story out a little bit.
So there was a lot of finding the piece within the piece that was happening in the drafting process.
There are three sections here, the last of which is called “Dwelling.”
It struck me: You have a “wedding essay.”
You have a “breakup essay.”
A breakup essay!"
But I think I am very interested in how we approach these milestones and sites of meaning.
Trying to honor them in that way.
That’s always my M.O.
But “Layover” had a different genesis process: Born like Athena, came out fully formed.
I wanted to come back to your process compiling this book.
It was the most straight piece of reported writing that I’d ever done.
But from the very beginning, I had a fantasy of writing another version of it.
That surprise keeps it interesting for me as a writer.
you’re able to’t fabricate that experience of surprise.
“I do think I embrace earnestness.
I really believe in earnestness.
I think it’s my native tongue.
The kind of earnestness I believe in couldn’t be those things if those things are unexamined.
Encountering it, we’re almost reflexively trained to recoil from it too.I totally agree.
I think there can be a knee-jerk recoiling.
I believe this thing.”
Easier than “Here’s how this author is doing this wrong.”
I’m interested in different forms of that bravery.
Often the writing that I love is willing to do that.
I grew up with a lot of absent men, so I grew up longing for them.
Longing for the man who would stay was one of the great driving engines of my life.
I felt unsatisfied by it.
It felt too simple.
That was a lot easier than having.
That was what I wanted to tell that version of myself from six years ago.
“This is the more complicated truth that this essay was trying to get at.”
The ways I felt frustrated at my earlier self were essential to making it a different, better piece.
There’s something really generative and human about that impulse to quarrel with our earlier selves.
You studied fiction but, obviously, have made a real name for yourself in the nonfiction space.
What’s your relationship to fiction like right now?
It has to do with a lot of things.
It felt like I was fumbling around in this twilight fertile space.
That felt freeing and liberating, to not have so many of those commandments lurking behind me.
It didn’t have so much pressure and so much weight on it.
It’s almost like I feel like the tables have turned about it.
Once something starts to feel familiar, it starts to feel dead.
There’s something about fiction that feels scary and unknown to me.
That’s part of the appeal too.
Maybe this gets back to your thing about earnestness.
What were the things I was trying to teach myself when I was writing this?
You might find solace in a rooftop garden in a digital wonderland.
We can’t know them from the outset.
We have to be caught off guard by them.
They come at us from angles we weren’t expecting.
My friend and I have a phrase for it called “acute simultaneity.”
This idea that remembering a past relationship can be simultaneously angering, saddening, and deeply consoling.
The way of honoring the ways that a wedding is a beginning and an ending at once.
Letting things be multiple ways at the same time.
It feels like it lets life be complicated and capacious in a way that I stand behind.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
