Leslie Jamison & Emmeline Clein

On this episode of Awakeners, Lena interviews writers Leslie Jamison and Emmeline Clein. Clein studied with Jamison at Columbia University’s MFA program, and the pair published their most recent books—Jamison’s memoir, Splinters, and Clein’s debut essay collection, Dead Weight—the very same week back in February 2024.

We discuss what they talked about on their most recent lunch date, how Jamison’s “Archive Fever” class shaped Clein’s research, how both of their books engage with the (often maligned) desire to “revoke” or undo your decisions as a woman, and what they’ve learned from each other when it comes to writing about eating disorders, self-harm, and pain. 

Bonus: Emmeline reads an excerpt from Leslie’s feedback on one of her early essay drafts, and Leslie reads from a lecture-turned-craft-essay about shame. 

“From the very beginning of our time working together, Emmeline’s work has also been about questions and dimensions of experience that are profoundly interesting to me, and that I want very much to be taken seriously. So I feel like I’m bringing questions I’ve been wrestling with my whole life to the things we talk about, and so many of those conversations have become part of the DNA of how I think about how women are trained to hate their bodies and what we do about it and how we harm ourselves, but also what hope and community might look like around those things.” —Leslie Jamison

“In The Recovering, you [Leslie] move between biographical vignettes, the personal, and interviews in a way I hadn’t seen before or understood as a possible way to tell the story of a disease… it helped me clarify how clinical distinctions function like the genre silos in nonfiction that try to keep us from telling the fuller story.” —Emmeline Clein

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

LISTEN ON APPLE PODCASTS

Leslie Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of Splinters, The Recovering, The Empathy Exams, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and teaches at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Emmeline Clein is the author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm (Knopf, 2024) and Toxic (Choo Choo Press, 2024). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, The Nation, the Yale Review, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.

MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE

Leslie Jamison's essay "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain" from The Empathy Exams

Leslie Jamison's essay "The Empathy Exams" (abridged) from The Empathy Exams

Leslie Jamison's "Archive Fever" syllabus

David Foster Wallace's cruise ship essay, "Shipping Out"