Book of the week

‘Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto,’’ reads the tattoo on Leslie Jamison’s arm: ‘‘I am human: nothing human is alien to me.’’ The epigraph for her first essay collection, The Empathy Exams – deliberations on the pain of others – which was published to rapturous praise in 2014, it reappears here in her second collection, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, more as a reprimand. ‘‘I’d gotten it with heartfelt intentions

[...] an expression of kinship and curiosity,’’ she explains in a piece about visiting Sri Lanka while on an assignment for a travel magazine, a country where the skeletons of genocide victims are buried in the sand of its so-called ‘‘unspoilt’’ beaches, ‘‘but now my own arm admonished me. Perhaps it was better to accept that not everything human was something I could know.’’

Still, however, Jamison tries. There’s an excellent essay about a solitary blue whale that has inspired a cult-like devotion among lonely acolytes, and another about a toddler whose parents believe he’s the reincarnation of an

American pilot shot down during World War II. Together, they seemingly continue the project of The Empathy Exams. ‘‘I found myself increasingly addicted to writing about lives or beliefs that others might have scoffed at,’’ our self-righteous defender of underdogs explains. But she wonders whether she’s also ‘‘too scared to push back against the stories people told themselves in order to keep surviving their own lives’’.

This is something Jamison knows about first-hand. (Her previous book, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, combined a memoir of her road to

sobriety with the stories of other alcoholic writers.) She credits the 12-step recovery programme with teaching her about ‘‘extinguishing, or at least suspending, many forms of scepticism at once: about dogma, about cliches, about programmes of insight and prefabricated awareness, about other people’s ostensibly formulaic narratives of their own lives’’. Thus, she’s actually less interested in whether reincarnation is real, for example, and more preoccupied with ‘‘the vision of the self’’ it ‘‘asks us to believe in’’: one that is ‘‘porous and unoriginal’’, something she relates to ‘‘what I loved about recovery – that it asked me to understand

myself as interchangeable, to see my dilemmas as shared and my identity as something oddly and inescapably connected to distant strangers’’.

The best work here is a pair of essays on photography, reaffirming Jamison as Susan Sontag’s heir. The first discusses James Agee and Walker Evans’ book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which documented three sharecropper families in 30s Alabama; the second, American photographer Annie Appel’s ongoing project to record the everyday, ordinary lives of a Mexican family she’s been photographing for a quarter of a century, an ‘‘intimate entanglement’’ that challenges traditional notions of artist and subject.

Herein, questions about the ethics of telling other people’s stories and of making art out of other people’s lives spit and flare like sulphurous flames. ‘‘Representing people always involves reducing them, and calling a project ‘done’ involves making an uneasy truce with that reduction,’’ Jamison laments. ‘‘But some part of me rails against that compression. Some part of me wants to keep saying: there’s more, there’s more, there’s more.’’ This railing, roaring Jamison is the one I came to hear.

– Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph