Essays are Pools, Tweets are Bathtubs
a review of Leslie Jamison’s Make It Scream, Make It Burn
In high school, we learn essays are boring and your parents won't notice if their liquor cabinet’s Malibu is down to its last shot. High school essays are covered in literary blackheads like: “In conclusion” and “the dictionary defines…” But I’ll read a grown-up essay over anything else, Malibu on the rocks in hand. Essays teach us that things... they’re like other things. Essays are swimming pools and fiction is the ocean. I want to learn to swim in a pool rather than an ocean. Tweets are bathtubs.
Is this copyright infringement or is there a loophole because it’s so bizarre?
The modern essay was popularized by mustachioed Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, who said: “I am myself the matter of the book.” I picture him saying this at an NBA post-game press conference to an audience of 16th-century French intelligentsia, his announcement dripping with “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach” arrogance. The crowd, befuddled but receptive to modern audiovisual technology, emits a collective gasp and “Oh mon dieu.”
Leslie Jamison is herself the matter of the book. Even with her eye focused on another she writes within the parameters of her own self-awareness, an eye on the road and the other checking “Am I good?” That question is essential to her, as well as the subjects she writes about. The collection inhabits a NO HEDONISM zone.
It is of my professional opinion that our minds are prisons in which we are both the prisoner and the warden. One time someone told me I was self-aware, and I responded, “crippingly so.” They laughed and I thought “AAAAAAAAAAAH! Who can repair the mute button on my nattering brain!” In The Empathy Exams, another Jamison essay collection, she wrote something I resonated with so deeply, but can’t find online and can’t fully remember so I shall butcher. Basically, it was about wanting someone to love you so much that you forget they have feelings, too, and that you are capable of hurting those feelings. *pulls at collar* Yikes!
Jamison doles out similar insights on the over-examined life in Make It Scream, Make It Burn. That the book begins with an essay on a “lonely” whale and ends with the birth of her daughter is no coincidence, it’s a nudge in the ribs and stage-whispered “that’s growth, baby!” Her writing is generous and lyrical, full of memorable metaphors that track across pages like croissant flakes in a beard appearing later. She admits when she expected the essay to exit toward Neat Conclusion Highway, but ended up on Ideological Backroad. This is a sacrifice to the essay genre gods, who demand the honesty of the newest iPhone camera (ok so… my face must be Camp Green Lake because my pores are massive holes...). But breaking the fourth wall is most effective when rare (unless you are Jim Halpert).
I forget that vulnerability is not a one-way ticket to Everybody Likes Me land. Jamison knows this, which makes her honesty all the nobler. She spatchcocks her psyche open like a Cornish game hen and expects no reward. I tell the truth once and expect the world to cheer me like a race winner in response.
My favorite essay, piece of writing perhaps, is Brian Doyle’s Joyas Voladoras. I read it in--of all places--high school and wanted it tattooed in my eyelids. I continue to love the way every detail brings gravitas, how it braids humanity and the natural world (an idea explored in 52 Blue). I love The Devil's Bait by Jamison, too, for making me say “What! That’s crazy!” to no one in particular.
When we learn that things are indeed like other things, we a) feel less alone and b) start to uncover more of the invisible ink in which life’s playbook was stupidly written. And the best part about essays: you can read them on your work computer and kind of pretend it’s something relevant to a project.