Words matter. These are the best Leslie Jamison Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I feel like I have a bit of a Type A personality.
Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege.
‘Tough’ is one of the last adjectives I would use to describe myself.
I used to believe that hurting would make you more alive to the hurting of others. I used to believe in feeling bad because somebody else did. Now I’m not so sure of either.
There’s something about that puritanical narrative of progress and upward mobility and work ethic that the glorification of abstinence fits pretty neatly into. That pairs with the fact that 12-step recovery has had too large a monopoly on how treatment is understood in America.
One of the big ways in which I felt my own writing life shaped by recovery had to do with my relationship to other people’s stories. And one of the things I loved most about recovery was the way in which, in meetings and through fellowship, you are constantly kind of paying attention to lives outside of your own.
It’s one of the most liberating things I experience in writing – letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn’t admit to yourself that it did.
The story of getting better can be just as compelling as the story of falling apart.
It’s kind of funny that I’ve been branded as the empathy lady when, really, what I’m doing is questioning and interrogating empathy.
You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It’s got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail – called The Twin Towers – isn’t beautiful at all; it’s a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh.
I don’t make films, and because I don’t make films, I’m not an expert in the craft of bringing a film into the world, how you put its various pieces together. But where I feel like I’m an expert is my own feelings in response to a film.
I had never really thought of myself as a baby person, but it’s just a really profound connection.
If you operate under the premise that everybody already has some experiences that could be sources of empathy for them, I wonder if there’s some process of coaxing people into tapping into that knowledge.
Somebody once asked me how I define sobriety, and my response was ‘liberation from dependence.’
Probably every person is some mixture of wanting to feel a sense of commonality and shared experience with others but also wanting to feel completely singular and unique.
My dad is an economist who does global development research. What he practices is a kind of quantifiable empathy: trying to empathize with systems rather than people.
After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn’t matter if it’s a story or a novel, I find that when it’s still fresh in my mind I’m either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I’m unable to make substantive edits of any value.
Difficulty is our most reliable narrative engine.
12-step recovery is very focused on abstinence, and that’s bled into the broader understanding of treatment. It would be most useful to have multiple senses of what treatment could look like.
Whenever I’ve been stuck on a project, it’s always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It’s a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel.
I really believe in people putting stories out there that contain the most difficult moments because nothing to me is more lonely making than sanitized stories or airbrushed stories that kind of allied how hard it got.
Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.
