On Literary Criticism and Reading Leslie Jamison

I’ve been following Leslie Jamison’s work for years. When she was on book tour for her 2019 essay collection, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, she gave a reading at Brazos Bookstore in Houston. She read a short essay “about Houston”—really an essay about self-mythologizing and correcting one’s assumptions, but the story happened because she spent an unexpected night in the hotel next to the international airport on the north side of town. She wrote about the spaghetti bowl highways like it was her own brilliant observation that Houston is an automobile-oriented city, and I felt proprietary and defensive. Did Leslie Jamison think spending a night near an airport—never even entering the city proper—qualified her to write about that confounding place? Of course, of course, my criticisms were just projections of my own anxiety: who was I to write about Houston? Were my years living in Third Ward enough to qualify me to say anything of substance? Was I just a pretender to insight? It was easier to pin those characteristics on Jamison than sit with my insecurities. 

At the reading, I bought a copy of her earlier book, The Empathy Exams, 2011 winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. I was last in line to get her autograph. My memory of reading The Empathy Exams: lying on my belly on the dark wooden floor in the apartment Michael and I shared, simultaneously illuminated and annoyed by the way life seemed to provide Jamison with the perfect embedded metaphors to illustrate her points. Something about her writing chafed me—she self-implicates, but performatively, as if she’s always looking over her shoulder, watching the reader accept her rationalizations—but I also wondered if my frustration was just envy heated up on the stove of ambition, because she seemed to pull off rhetorical feats that I couldn’t. 

So I’ve continued to read Leslie Jamison. I read her next essay collection, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, in the break room at the liquor store. The titular essay explores Jamison’s response to James Agee, author of the famously impenetrable Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Jamison describes Agee as possessing “a tyrannical narrative consciousness”. “Imagine a director’s cut five times as long as the film itself,” Jamison writes, “with the camera constantly turning to gaze at the face of the director himself.” Another outburst I had to stifle in the break room: reading this, I wanted to shout at the text, at Jamison, that’s how I feel about your work! It’s something of a trope that in writing about other artists, writers will often say something that inadvertently reflects back on themself. A classic example is David Foster Wallace’s (brilliant, hilarious) essay, “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think,” his scathing takedown of “Mailer, Updike, Roth—the Great Male Narcissists” of postwar American fiction. 

In my notes on Make It Scream, Make It Burn, I wrote: Jamison’s whole thing is that she wants to see beauty where other people see kitsch. She is constantly naming this desire, narrating her effort: regarding the fountains outside the Bellagio, regarding her choice to put aside skepticism of reincarnation, regarding the power of belonging and the pathos generated by a human myth about a supposedly lonely whale. But her insistence on the effort reifies the distance between her and the realization of her desire. She wants to find beauty there, but naming the wanting implies its lack of fulfillment, drawing attention to the fact that she doesn’t see beauty there yet. If she did, and did so effortlessly, it wouldn’t be worth the mention. It would be implicit, self-evident, a foregone conclusion. By naming the wanting, Jamison elevates her own posture. She dismisses dismissiveness as morally inferior while she simultaneously fetishizes her own efforts.

I gossiped about Jamison’s work to friends, discussed her on the bus to writing residencies with faculty, dissected her essays in text threads with fellow writers. “Jamison manages to mention she went to Harvard and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in a single essay about the saccharine,” one friend pointed out. Jamison is famous and accomplished, a darling of contemporary nonfiction. She directs the nonfiction concentration at Columbia University. She’s been lauded as a spiritual successor to Joan Didion, a scribe for our time. I want to understand how her writing works: what she’s doing that makes it so relatable, and what she’s doing that drives me nuts. So I wrote a review of her new memoir, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. 

I finished my first read-through while I was sick with covid in early October. The timing felt significant, fortuitous, because the final section of the book recalls Jamison sick with covid, bad, in early 2020 New York. When I caught covid the first time, I was finishing Make It Scream, Make It Burn. I loved the way that book ended: with a call to staying rather than endless searching, a summons to satisfaction over anticipation. In Splinters, Jamison finds that the life she described at the end of Make It Scream was personally unsustainable, irrevocably fractured. 

After the virus left my body, I went to the library with a friend and spitballed about everything I didn’t know how to say about the book. Splinters elicited so many reactions in me. Would I write about the tension between all the different identities Jamison inhabits: mother, wife, daughter, teacher, writer? Would I write about the evocative passages in which she visits art exhibitions in New York, finding new scripts for her life in the work projected on the walls? Would I write about her problematic relationship to self-love, which she describes at one point as “a kind of poison”? While I read, I laughed at—with?—the protagonist, but her choices made me cringe. How does a critic write about memoir without making it personal? How do I limit my reactions to the text and not Jamison’s life, or personhood? In a podcast hosted by The Point mag, talking about Charles D’Ambrosio’s essay “Documents,” Jamison pointed out that the author gives the reader the material by which the reader is able to judge them. Sure, the author is culpable, but they also didn’t have to reveal that about themself, Jamison says. There’s a mutuality, a reciprocity, in the art of self-revelation. 

For over a month, I didn’t write a single word of the review. 

Mid-November, the anxiety set in. Given the way literary journal publication timelines work, I was behind schedule. I spent Thanksgiving Break at a massive wooden table, laptop open, flipping through my literary notebook, trying to assemble an argument.

“Is someone paying you to do this?” my mother-in-law asked. How sweetly naive. Her question was so sincere that I almost let go of my hair to say, Of course I’m not getting paid. I’m doing this for fun. 

And it was fun. When I review a book, I feel like I’m cracking a code, probing deep enough into a text to assess its inner workings. I’m spending time exploring the creation of Leslie Jamison’s fascinating brain. What a privilege to get to do this, to inhabit someone else’s prose world for a while, to honor it with sustained consideration. I’m learning about what language can do, how a brilliant (and pretentiously educated) writer can shape the material of their life into art. 

I will also say: it felt like a fraught choice to undertake reviewing a book with whose author I already have such a complicated parasocial relationship. Is it the ideal role of the critic to approach a work they know nothing about, to encounter the work solely on the basis of its own terms, and to form an aesthetic pronouncement inside that vacuum of context? Or is there a place for criticism rooted in lived experience, that not only acknowledges the critic’s fundamental subjectivity but feeds on it, incorporates into the criticism the singularity and incongruity of emotional reaction? These are questions that the brilliant Claire Dederer wrestles with in her ground-breaking book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. She writes about embracing her own subjectivity, honing her voice and her critical priorities, as a young female critic in Seattle in the nineties. “I knew I was supposed to be a cultural arbiter,” Claire says, “but I kept slipping up and being the audience.” (Two pages later, she recounts: “I chose a really miserable time to be a [film] critic—it seemed like in the mid-nineties every single film released had a pistol whipping in it. You’re watching a romantic comedy—suddenly a pistol whipping! Musical—pistol whipping!”)

Monsters deals primarily with the question of emotional and aesthetic response to beautiful work created by terrible people. You know the type: Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Picasso. My question of critical accountability was how to address, or account for, my frustration with Jamison’s work. To what extent am I frustrated with the work, and to what extent am I resentful of her success? Where are my frustrations ultimately rooted in circumstances that shape my life as a female nonfiction writer? Jamison has been hailed as a genre-defining voice: does my annoyance with her writing simply betray my own insecurity?

At the beginning of April, while I was in Texas for the eclipse, I fell down an internet hole following the drama about the latest viral takedown on Literary Twitter: Ann Manov’s review of Lauren Oyler’s new essay collection, No Judgment. I haven’t read either of Oyler’s books (her debut was an internet-centric novel, Fake Accounts, that came out around the same time as Patricia Lockwood’s dazzling internet-novel, No One Is Talking About This), but Manov contextualizes Oyler’s work and her rise to relative (niche) fame thusly: “Oyler owes her present notoriety to “takedowns” of a seriess of prominent women—Roxane Gay, Greta Gerwig, Sally Rooney, Jia Tolentino.”

I gasped my way through the Bookforum review. It was a juicy piece, full of well-placed pull-quotes that made Oyler look pretty dumb. Oyler’s own words, included in the Bookforum review in a block quote:
”My problem is not just that I am a writer; it’s also the kind of writer I am. A snob, highbrow, elitist, I find the concept of plot oppressive, value style over voice, and enjoy an unfamiliar vocabulary word. At the movies, I prefer subtitles; at the museum, I can probably identify a decent percentage of the permanent collection by sight. Unless you count DJ sets, which I don’t, the last live music I saw was at the opera…”

I mean, of all the self-inflating pretension! But this is also the work of the critic: to furnish evidence from the source material that illustrates the critic’s point. (It’s worth noting, perhaps, that the same Ann Manov who lambasted Lauren Oyler on Bookforum also wrote a review for the New Statesman that totally skewered Monsters, which I just admitted to loving [I read Manov’s review; it did not change my mind].)

The review blew up on Twitter. At first, my feed was filled with people, like me, greedily gobbling the drama. But after twenty minutes of scrolling, the conversation took on more dimension.
The writer Amber Sparks asked, “What are the pressures of this industry that makes so many women feel that they have to Susan Sontag themselves, position themselves as smarter and better than everyone else, and/or see other and only other women writers as a threat?”
Writer Jenny G. Zhang said it this way: “how much of all this critic-on-critic violence can we directly attribute to the phenomenon of becoming a literary it girl requiring the calculated decision to brand oneself, in both reputation and in one’s own writing, as a hot girl”

The further I scrolled, the more I felt a question prickling the back of my neck. Was my Splinters review a literary takedown, a clawing example of girl-on-girl violence? When are my reactions—and I mean this both as a critic and an individual—about the work (or the stimulus), and when are they about me?

And in either case, what do I offer to the world by writing about it?

While I was finishing my review, a friend sent me critic Parul Sehgal’s New Yorker article about the lives of critics. Sehgal suggests that critics feed our lives to the artwork we examine. Her language made me think of the tree guys who knocked on our door the day before: neon-vested men who trimmed weak branches off the ornamental apricot tree and tossed them into the wood-chipper in the cul-de-sac. Through the windows, I heard one of them saying the wood smelled sweet when it was mulched. 

Criticism takes a lot of work. Reflection. Time. Spending the effort on a piece of art to respond to it thoughtfully and fairly is both labor and love. At long last, my review has finally come out. Jamison is a big enough name, and the book was featured on so many “Most Anticipated Books of 2024” lists, that most journals had more established critics lined up to cover Splinters. (For other obsessive followers of the paper trail, I loved this review at the Los Angeles Review of Books [dream pub] and this dual-review in The New Republic!) What is the purpose of intense, time-consuming criticism when I’m not even sure people will encounter my reviews? I’m not writing this for Jamison, and even if I was, the book has already gone to print. What I can hope is that there’s something productive in the process of spending time with another person’s work. I’m learning to better understand the machinations of prose, how a narrator earns purchase with a reader, how to effect a satisfying sense of transformation. And it’s fun.