Could Leslie Jamison please stop sitting on the fence?

Leslie Jamison is creating quite a stir in America. Her first collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, went straight to the New York Times bestseller list, and this second collection comes crowned in laurels: ‘She’s an unstoppable force of nature,’ says her American editor. ‘This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best,’ says Eleanor Catton. Stephen King calls her ‘required reading’, and early reviewers on the website Goodreads describe this book as ‘genius’, ‘astounding’, ‘resplendent’ and ‘epiphanic’.

Because she is a woman who writes essays, Jamison has been compared with Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm and Susan Sontag, but she is the antithesis of her predecessors. A recovered alcoholic, Jamison speaks the lingo of sharing, gratitude and moral righteousness (in her acknowledgements she thanks those friends ‘who simply helped me survive my own life’). She trades in platitudes, believes that scepticism contains an ‘ethical failure’, and ‘has doubts about doubt’. As an ‘expression of kinship and curiosity’ with the world, she has the words ‘Nothing human is alien to me’ tattooed on her arm. She thus carries her heart on her sleeve: there is no experience she can’t relate to; her belief system is ‘tolerant enough to hold everything as equally valid’. If Didion, Malcolm and Sontag are caviar from a live fish, Jamison is a side serving of kale.

Divided into three sections, Make It Scream, Make It Burn is about outsiders and the power of love. The opening essay, ‘52 Blue’, describes the discovery in 1992 of a whale with an audio signature of 52 hertz (the songs of most blue whales have a frequency of 15 to 20 hertz). The creature apparently swims alone, singing to himself; while no other whales respond to him, a whole school of humans have reached out to his pain in tweets, such as #Forever Alone and #SadLife.