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Before she was a writer people quoted on empathy, Leslie Jamison was paid to fake illness: as a medical actor, she performed symptoms for medical students, who were then graded on how much empathy they showed her. That job opens The Empathy Exams (2014), the essay collection that won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and entered The New York Times bestseller list. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1983 and raised in Los Angeles, she studied at Harvard, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Yale, where her PhD on addiction literature became the memoir The Recovering. She teaches at Columbia, and in 2025 won the $75,000 Weston International Award for her nonfiction. This guide covers her 5 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 key books · 2010–2024 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Leslie Jamison has published five books: the novel The Gin Closet (2010), the essay collections The Empathy Exams (2014) and Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019), and the memoirs The Recovering (2018) and Splinters (2024). A novel, The Daughters, is due in February 2027. Start with The Empathy Exams; the essays run from a medical-actor job to the Barkley Marathons and a disease many doctors say does not exist.
Where to Start with Leslie Jamison
If you want her defining book
→ The Empathy Exams (2014) — essays on pain and what we owe each other’s.
If you want addiction and recovery
→ The Recovering (2018) — her drinking, set against the writers who drank.
If you want her most personal book
→ Splinters (2024) — a marriage ending and a daughter arriving.
If you want fiction
→ The Gin Closet (2010) — her only novel so far.
5 Leslie Jamison Books, in Order
The Gin Closet
Her debut, published by Free Press. After her grandmother dies, Stella goes looking for her estranged aunt Tilly, an alcoholic living alone in the Nevada desert, and moves in with her; the two women, and Tilly’s grown son, try to become a family. The novel was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction.
The Empathy Exams
Essays published by Graywolf Press in April 2014 as winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. The title essay draws on her work as a medical actor; others cover Morgellons disease, the Barkley Marathons ultramarathon, a prison visit, poverty tourism, her abortion and heart surgery, and being punched in Nicaragua, ending with “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”. It entered The New York Times bestseller list at No. 11, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
The Recovering
Jamison’s account of her own drinking and sobriety, set alongside the lives of writers and artists who drank, including Raymond Carver, John Berryman, Jean Rhys and Billie Holiday, and the stories told in recovery meetings. It grew out of her Yale dissertation on addiction and sincerity in American literature, and questions the idea that intoxication feeds art. Entertainment Weekly named it the best nonfiction book of 2018, and it was a finalist for an American Booksellers Association book award.
Make It Scream, Make It Burn
Her second collection, in three parts: Longing, Looking and Dwelling. Subjects include “52 Blue”, a whale whose call no other whale seems to answer, the online world Second Life, and, in the last part, her own marriage, pregnancy and life as a stepmother. Like The Empathy Exams, it was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Splinters
Published by Little, Brown in February 2024. Jamison writes about the birth of her daughter, the strain it put on a marriage already in couples counselling, the separation and divorce, and the first years of raising a child alone while writing and teaching. She also returns to her parents’ divorce, her eating disorder and her drinking.
In What Order to Read Leslie Jamison
Begin with The Empathy Exams: it is the book that made her name, and it sets out the question the later books return to, how far we can feel someone else’s pain and what we owe them. Then read The Recovering, which takes up her drinking, already present in the early essays, at full length.
Make It Scream, Make It Burn and Splinters can be read in publication order: the last essays of the collection, about her marriage and stepmotherhood, lead straight into the memoir of that marriage ending. The Gin Closet, her only novel so far, is best read once you know the nonfiction, since it handles the same subjects of family and alcohol in fiction. Her second novel, The Daughters, is due in February 2027.
A reading path
1. “The Empathy Exams” (the title essay)
2. The Empathy Exams (2014)
3. The Recovering (2018)
4. Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019)
5. Splinters (2024)
6. The Gin Closet (2010)
Other books
Beyond the 5 key books: 2 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Standalone essay and forthcoming
2
2 books · 2014–2027
- 201452 Bluelong essay on the whale, first published on its own in 2014 and later collected in Make It Scream, Make It Burn
- 2027The Daughtersnovel, announced by Little, Brown for February 2027: three women across three timelines, from ancient Knossos to Crete in 1997
The years · 1983–2025
Quick facts about Leslie Jamison
- Known for
- Personal essays and memoir that combine her own experience of pain, addiction and family with reporting and literary criticism, most famously in The Empathy Exams.
- 1983
- Born in Washington, D.C.; raised in Los Angeles
- 2025
- Weston International Award
- Born
- 21 June 1983, Washington, D.C.; grew up in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles
- Education
- AB, Harvard College (2004); MFA, Iowa Writers’ Workshop; PhD in English, Yale
- Teaching
- Columbia University School of the Arts since 2015; directs the nonfiction concentration
- Honours
- Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize; Weston International Award (2025); Cullman Center Fellow, New York Public Library (2024–25)
- Family
- Daughter of the economist Dean Jamison; niece of the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison; one daughter
- Next book
- The Daughters, a novel, due February 2027
The red mark is 2014: The Empathy Exams, the essay collection that made her name.
How Leslie Jamison Writes: The Self as Evidence
Jamison starts from her own body and history and then widens the frame. The title essay of The Empathy Exams moves between her script as a medical actor and her real abortion and heart surgery; the same book follows people with Morgellons disease, runners in the Barkley Marathons and a prisoner in West Virginia, testing whether she can feel what they feel and whether she should claim to.
She mixes memoir with research and criticism. The Recovering began as a Yale dissertation, and it sets her own drinking beside the biographies of Raymond Carver, John Berryman and Jean Rhys and beside the plain stories told in recovery meetings, which she came to value over the myth of the brilliant drunk. Her sentences are long and self-questioning, often stopping to doubt the claim just made.
Her later books turn the method on her closest relationships: stepmotherhood in Make It Scream, Make It Burn, a marriage and its end in Splinters, told in short fragments rather than one arc. For writers who work the same ground, see Authors like Leslie Jamison.
Watch
Leslie Jamison in conversation
Jamison talks about her career and her nonfiction at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in September 2025, as that year’s Weston International Award laureate.
Frequently asked questions about Leslie Jamison’s books
How many books has Leslie Jamison written?
Five: the novel The Gin Closet (2010), the essay collections The Empathy Exams (2014) and Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019), and the memoirs The Recovering (2018) and Splinters (2024). A sixth, the novel The Daughters, is due in February 2027.
What are Leslie Jamison’s books in order?
The Gin Closet (2010), The Empathy Exams (2014), The Recovering (2018), Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019) and Splinters (2024).
Where should I start with Leslie Jamison?
With The Empathy Exams. If you want a single essay first, read the title essay, about her work as a medical actor.
What is Leslie Jamison’s most famous book?
The Empathy Exams (2014). It won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, entered The New York Times bestseller list at No. 11 and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014.
Is The Recovering a memoir?
Yes, though not only that. It tells the story of her drinking and recovery and combines it with criticism of how writers such as Raymond Carver, John Berryman and Jean Rhys wrote about addiction.
What is Splinters about?
The birth of her daughter, the end of her marriage and the first years of single motherhood. Kirkus describes a marriage already in couples counselling before the baby arrived.
Has Leslie Jamison won any awards?
The Empathy Exams won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, and in 2025 she received the $75,000 Weston International Award, given by the Writers’ Trust of Canada for a body of nonfiction. The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn were both PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel finalists, and The Gin Closet was a Los Angeles Times First Fiction finalist.
Does Leslie Jamison have a new book coming out?
Yes. The Daughters, a novel, is due from Little, Brown in February 2027. It follows three women in three timelines: Queen Pasiphaë in ancient Knossos, a woman in New York in 1944 and a grieving young woman on Crete in 1997.
Is Leslie Jamison related to Kay Redfield Jamison?
Yes. The psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, is her aunt. Her father is the economist Dean Jamison.
What is Leslie Jamison’s position on the Israeli literary boycott?
In 2024 she was one of the original signatories of the open letter “Refusing Complicity in Israel’s Literary Institutions”, which called on writers to boycott Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers and literary festivals. The letter was widely debated in the publishing world.
Footnotes
- Leslie Jamison — Wikipedia
- Leslie Jamison — Columbia University School of the Arts
- The Empathy Exams — Graywolf Press
- Excerpt: The Empathy Exams — NPR, 2014
- Splinters review — Kirkus Reviews
- American writer Leslie Jamison wins 2025 $75K Weston International Award — CBC
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.”
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)
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