Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison writes essays and memoir that treat empathy itself as a discipline requiring real intellectual effort, not just good intentions. Across a novel, three essay-adjacent nonfiction books, and a memoir, she returns to the same questions from different angles: what do we actually owe each other’s pain, what does recovery cost, and how do we hold multiple, contradictory identities — mother, addict, ex-wife, writer — at once without resolving into just one.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Essays · Memoir · Updated August 2026
Quick answer
Leslie Jamison has written five books: the novel The Gin Closet (2011), the essay collections The Empathy Exams (2014) and Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019), the memoir The Recovering (2018), and the memoir Splinters (2024). Start with The Empathy Exams — it’s her best-known book and a defining work of the modern personal essay.
Key facts
- Role: Teaches nonfiction writing at Columbia University School of the Arts
- Books written: 5, published 2011–2024; a sixth, The Daughters, is forthcoming in 2027
- Background: Harvard College; MFA, Iowa Writers’ Workshop; PhD, Yale University
- Best-known book: The Empathy Exams (2014), a New York Times bestseller and one of the year’s top 10 books at multiple outlets
- Recognition: The Recovering was named Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Entertainment Weekly
Why trust this list: Every book below is one I’ve read in full. Curated by Lisanne Swart.
In this guide
The Gin Closet
A novel following Stella, a young woman who takes in her estranged, alcoholic great-aunt Tilly after a family crisis, forcing both women to confront addiction, family failure, and what obligation actually means between relatives who barely know each other.
Her only novel, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award — worth reading to see the themes of addiction and inherited family damage she’d return to nonfictionally in The Recovering years later.
The Empathy Exams: Essays
A collection of essays moving between reportage and memoir — Jamison’s work as a medical actor simulating symptoms for training doctors, ultramarathon running, her own experience of an abortion and a broken jaw — united by a sustained argument that empathy is an active, effortful practice, not a passive feeling.
A New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of 2014, cited by multiple outlets among the year’s ten best. The book that established her as a defining voice of the contemporary personal essay.
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath
Jamison weaves her own history of alcoholism and recovery together with a critical survey of addiction narratives across literary history — Raymond Carver, John Berryman, Billie Holiday — questioning the cultural myth that suffering and substance abuse are prerequisites for great art.
Named Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Entertainment Weekly and a finalist for the American Booksellers Association Book Award. Part memoir, part literary criticism, entirely unwilling to romanticize the addiction it examines.
Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays
A second essay collection organized around themes of longing, looking, and dwelling — subjects range from a lonely whale whose call no other whale can hear, to the online community Second Life, to Jamison’s own stepmotherhood.
A finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and proof that The Empathy Exams wasn’t a one-time formula — the same restless curiosity applied to a fresh set of subjects.
Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
Jamison’s first true memoir, examining the end of her marriage and the early months of raising her daughter as a new single mother, holding grief for a departed love alongside genuine joy in a new one without letting either cancel the other out.
Her most intimate book, praised by Mary Karr as an instant classic. A study in holding contradictory truths — loss and arrival, exhaustion and love — inside the same sentence.
