Ideas - Why the practice of empathy is far from simple

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

In today's fractured world, the many threats facing humanity seems to be an empathy deficit. Writer and journalist Leslie Jamison discusses the complicated nature of empathy and the dearth of it at a time when it’s needed more than ever. Jamison argues it's important to maintain a certain kind of humility when it comes to understanding other people.We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Leslie Jameson's budding career as a novelist looked very promising 15 years ago. But something seemed missing. Writing only felt good to me. when it felt like throwing myself off a cliff. So I decided to throw myself off a different cliff, the truth. So she shifted to writing nonfiction and teasing out the truths and meanings of her own life,

her experiences, compulsions, desires, motivations, and connections to other people. There can hardly be a subject where a writer is more exposed than herself, especially when she is determined to inspect herself unsparingly. The first few times I wrote personal essays, I wrote almost exclusively about the parts of myself I liked least, or the situations I most regretted. I was convinced that self-deprecation was the only way

to speak truthfully about myself, or at least the only way to escape the thing I feared most, the trap of self-aggrandizement. Leslie Jameson is a widely acclaimed writer whose work runs the gamut from cultural analysis to journalistic reports from around the world to personal essays written from a place of great vulnerability. The experiences she writes of in memoirs like The Recovering, Intoxication and Its Aftermath, or Splinters, another kind of love story, are often searing, sometimes humiliating, often sobering in all senses of the word. and sometimes transformative and always illuminating, a reckoning with herself as a complicated human being. Rigorous personal narrative demands refusing the refuge of either extreme,

I'm the best, I'm the worst, and living instead the mess and contradictions of selfhood and experience, making the self neither villain nor saint, and granting the same dignity of complexity to everyone else as well. I've come to believe that the forms of rigor and tenderness that nuanced personal narrative demands are tendencies we can bring back to daily living, to move through the world with humility, grace, humor, and compassion, to tolerate complexity, to stay curious. Leslie Jamison's biggest honor yet was the 2025 Western International Award for Nonfiction

presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada. She accepted the award at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where she gave a talk defending and celebrating the personal essay as a powerful form of non-fiction art. The fact that I make art from my own life can still sometimes feel embarrassing, even after years of writing and teaching personal narrative, as if I've failed to get over myself

or failed to learn how to make anything else. My shame, I think, doesn't simply stem from the fear that there might be an unredeemable solipsism baked into personal writing, but from the fear that my particular life is too unremarkable to bear the weight of narrative. This is the eternal question that my students bring to me each week in office hours. Why would anyone possibly care? For literary fiction, we don't question the value of the unextradinary life as a worthy subject. Mrs. Dalloway

is about a woman throwing a dinner party. Ulysses is about a cuckled and salesman wandering through Dublin. But in... This will go down with me to my great my paraphrase of James Joyce. But

in nonfiction, there's a sense that you need either extraordinary accomplishment or extraordinary trauma to make your story worthwhile. My flashes of shame also stem, I think, from the presumption of artlessness that can attach to personal narrative. The assumption that when you make art from life, you just sort of excreted, maximum exposure and minimal effort. It's also emblematic of the bodily language often applied to writing about the self, especially female writing about the self, gushing, vomiting, purging, bleeding.

Identity and experience become fluids that get barfed or sweated onto the page. Leave it to a woman to reveal herself as little more than a body when she'd imagined herself a writer. These bodily metaphors secreting, bleeding, vomiting, point to an important misunderstanding about how so-called confessional writing works, or personal narrative more broadly. It's often seen as straight, exposed, selfhood offered without craft and artifice.

But I believe the word exposure is already a lie. What we do on the page or off of it, it's always something else. It's self-construction. Or rather, the exposure involved in personal narrative is less like the exposure of disrobing, getting naked on the page, and more like the exposure that happens in a dark room, a process in which you bring lived experience into contact with sensibility, curiosity, and the possibilities of language, like prints exposed to their chemical baths,

and try to express what this alchemy brings into view. One of our most dismissive terms for art made from life is navel-gazing. A phrase that I heard dismissively applied to my own work for years before I learned that it actually derives from an ancient Greek meditation practice called, This is the hardest part of my talk. Omphilos, skeptist, literally, navel thinking. Omphalos is navel, and skeptis means contemplation. These days, navel gazing is understood as the epitome of solipsism.

But in ancient Greek culture, the navel was seen as a site of connection to the divine. The marble omfalos at Delphi, for example, was one of the most important sites of communion with the gods. biologically, the navel is the part of the self that marks its earliest threshold of connection, a physical reminder that we are not self-made, but always produced by forces beyond ourselves. The Greeks understood the navel in this way, the mark of our connection to something larger than ourselves, and to me, this is what rigorous personal narrative also involves, a consideration of self whose motivating questions and deepening insights resonate beyond the self, not through false conflation or universalizing insistence,

but through a close, faithful, dynamic commitment to particularity, the infinitude of any given life as a sight of reckoning and truth. In Christian theology, there's an idea called the scandal of particularity, the improbable but essential fact that God became incarnate as a particular man with dirt under his fingernails and spit in his mouth. The scandal is not only the absurdity of divinity dwelling inside a flawed mortal vessel. This man is God, this guy with shifty eyes and stringy hair, washing the feet of his disciples, but the absurdity of putting so much weight on a specific man and his specific man. life. The writer Annie Dillard brings the scandal of divine particularity back to all of us.

She writes, the scandal of particularity is the only world that I, in particular, know. We're all up to our necks in this particular scandal. Yes, we all live inside the particulars of our own lives, stifling and beloved, profound and mundane, vexing and glorious, because we have no choice. We can't live other lives. It can feel absurd to believe in ordinary life as a sight of profundity. School pickups, grocery store runs, whispered fights in bed, but this is the scandalous truth of all personal writing, the scandal of big truths dwelling in ordinary lives. But of course, First big truths dwell in ordinary lives. What other vessels could they possibly have?

What process could be more ancient or essential than telling stories about what we've lived? Over the past 20 years, I've written about my own life from many angles in a critical memoir called The Recovering that tells the story of my own drinking and sobriety alongside the stories of other writers and artists who have tried to get sober, in a memoir called Splinters that recounts the birth of my daughter and the end of my marriage, and in essays that often braids together personal narrative with other modes of inquiry,

reportage, criticism, cultural history, essays about everything from caesarian sections to anorexia, imposter syndrome, to ultramarathons, Frida Callos, painted corsets, to a mysterious blue whale known as the loneliest whale in the world. And I write personal essays that delve into some of the toughest, most complex emotional experiences of my own life, relationships and their endings, childbirth, abortion,

heart surgery, eating disorders, sexuality and desire. But my life is just one well of source material I draw on. It does not have a monopoly on my interest, but I don't shy away from it either. it's the life I know best. All my work across all these modes and genres is animated by the same fundamental curiosity about what it feels like to be alive and how we can express that experience of aliveness with language.

Of all the forms of writing I do, there's no writing I end up revising more than personal narrative. When the writing is about my own life, I'll end up revising five times, 10, 15, times, over the course of years, almost always. I'm not just talking about line edits, but major rethinking and reworking, telling parts of the story I was too ashamed or afraid to tell the first time around, recognizing that I did something for many reasons rather than just one, granting more grace to people I still resent. The first draft of my book, The Recovering,

an exploration of addiction, recovery, and creativity began with something like a cinematic montage of the ways I'd fallen in love with drinking. Getting drunk in Midwestern backyards full of fireflies, air smoky from Bratwurst on the grill, cold beers drunk on the side of covered bridges. An early reader of these opening pages told me, I don't want to see you living your best life getting buzzed. I want to see you with your wine-stained teeth, too nervous to speak. That reader was right. I was trapped inside the same evasions I was trying to document,

using intoxication as an escape from vulnerability. I was showing the dream before I showed the broken, self-loathing, lurching around with insecurity self who needed something from that dream. So I forced myself into scene, specifically into one of my most embarrassing nights, a night that dramatized how much I craved some sense of affirmation and acceptance. The night I did cocaine for the first time with a guy who was barely but just barely interested in me. Back then, my favorite kind, I was wearing a winter jacket inside and still shivering because this guy I was doing coke with was too broke to pay for much heat. And it was an Iowa winter and really cold,

like kill you cold. And he was cutting lines with a credit card that was almost certainly actually a debit card. And I needed so desperately for this night to be the beginning of some great romance between us. So I lingered in this guy's living room for hours, practically begging him to kiss me. And then he finally said it, are you waiting for me to kiss you? And I sort of nodded, yes, stunned at this subtext, becoming so pathetically explicit. And he finally did. But he seemed half-hearted, like he was only doing it because I begged him to. And then I stumbled home, humiliated.

This was the part of me that needed to drink. That girl stumbling home, bruising her shins on the stairs, already imagining this guy telling his friends at a bar the next night. Like it was weird. She just really seemed like she wanted me to kiss her. This girl hating herself for asking someone to want her. This was the part of me that needed to drink and needed to be written. Not that self standing in a backyard strung with twinkly lights surrounded by fireflies, laughing. I didn't know that laughing girl. She was the self I wanted the world to see. But I needed to write away from that self. I wasn't writing. a social resume. I was writing a book about need. Pivoting from backyard fireflies to debit card cut coke was an exercise in crossing out the dream and exposing vulnerability as the soft underbelly of swagger, showing the need before I showed the accessories and props the need gathered around itself, booze and male desire, these futile attempts to satisfy its bottomless appetites. As the essayist Philip Lopate likes to say,

the problem with most confessional writing is that it does not confess enough. I like this formulation because it aptly diagnoses a crucial problem with a certain kind of eye when the eye has been deployed as a character but not yet as a narrator, the one who lived the experience,

but not yet the one who can make meaning from it. which is to say, often personal narrative tells you what happened without doing enough work to figure out why it matters, without using the eye as a character to fuel a deeper investigation. So what does it mean to confess enough? For me, it has to do with following shame to insight rather than getting stuck in either self-justification or self-laceration. And our job, through revision and self-suspicion,

is to get to the messier account lurking beyond the edges of what I call the cocktail party version of the story. I sometimes envision this part of the process as looking for trapdoor in the floor to get to the rooms of truth beneath. Finding the eye beneath the floorboards is often a question of revision, bearing down hard on language that wants to generalize, moralize, valorize, villainize, villainize or otherwise evade the contradictory resonances of experience. When my editor, Ben, read the first draft of the recovering, he told me that the volatile romantic relationship at the core of the story was still blurry. In trying to establish what was breaking down between us, he said, I needed to dramatize our fights more specifically,

not just repetitively reiterate that fights were happening. He said it more generously than this. At first, I summoned all my furious defenses. I don't just say we kept fighting, and then I look back at the manuscript. All winter, we kept fighting. I tended to summon our fights in broad brushstrokes of emotional analysis. Ben told me I needed to stop saying how I felt. He'd counted 300 usages of the phrase I felt in my manuscript,

and do more dramatizing instead, bringing readers. more fully into the weeds of conflict. He was urging me deeper into the scandal of particularity. I wasn't up to my neck in it yet. He liked the scene where I described myself as a wild animal, watching my boyfriend flirt

with another girl across the room, a scene I had barely been able to write. I wanted so much to part ways from that wild animal to be someone who had never been her. I was mortified by the prospect of writing more specifically about our fights. They'd been knocked down, drag out fights about the pettiest things.

Who would care? I wanted to skip past the embarrassing narrative and get straight to the insights. To engage in meaning-making as a way to redeem experiences I still felt ashamed of, a way of apologizing for how jealous and insecure I'd been, exonerating that prior self by saying something wise about what she'd done. I wanted to fast forward straight past vulnerability, right into wisdom. But I realized that without the vulnerability, the mess and grit of what happened, the wisdom would just feel like a hollow performance. I started to realize that the scenes I was most ashamed to Neri were also the ones that illuminated my needs and desires most forcefully.

I had to arrive at insight through particularity, rather than using insight to make a kind of end. and around the guts of the story, using abstraction as a kind of psychic armor. What did my shame, not just the shame of fighting, but the shame of writing about it, teach me? Not just that sobriety exposed my underlying insecurities rather than solving them, but that I felt profoundly degraded by these insecurities, by the helpless checking of text messages, by the banality of an argument about what did or did not constitute flirting, and that I was afraid that the presence of the profane my own need and fear would pollute love,

that I still thought of love as something other than a force already inescapably but also gloriously polluted. My obsession with a certain kind of purity was the very thing that made it impossible to feel safe. I have never made art from my own life because I believed my life was anything special. It's just the life I have, the one I have lived. When I spend hours interviewing other people for my reported work,

it comes from the same well of curiosity, this same animating question. What does it feel like to be alive? All of us have different answers, and our answers are always changing, which means there is so much to stay curious about. every spring I teach a graduate writing course at Columbia called the self every spring it reminds me that personal narrative is at its core an act of engagement and community

rather than an expression of narcissism picture it picture us Tuesday afternoons all 55 of us crammed into a too small classroom with rattling heaters or broken air conditioning sweating up a storm. I can still remember them, a man writing about his compulsive relationship to smiling and how it connected to his absent father, his need to please, and his childhood spent in the back of his mom's Thai restaurant

in a Los Angeles strip mall. A woman from New Jersey writing about the suburbs, surveillance, single motherhood, and sex. Whenever I looked at her, I remembered a line from one of her essays, is about feeling like she had grown up in the minivans of tired women. A poet from Nepal who wrote about caregiving, daydreaming, and how the women in her family related to their hair.

Every day, my students taught me, they still teach me about the possibilities of personal narrative. If I felt hounded by the shame of solipsism, when I first began to write about my own life, I have come to believe something close to the opposite. It is a deeply communal act to make art from your own scandalously particular life and to believe in the art that other people can make from theirs.

Thank you. That's Leslie Jameson, the 2025 winner of the Weston International Award for nonfiction, speaking at the Royal Ontario. Museum in September. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyhead. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam

includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at spec savers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at specksavers.cavers.cairists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. Canadians love Canadian eggs. You can count on them to be fresh, local, and reliable, because for every egg, it takes a farmer. Up early, working hard, meeting Canada standards. And behind every. Egg Farmer is Supply Management, a made-in-Canada system that delivers a steady supply of eggs produced right here at home. Learn more at eggfarmers.ca.ca.combed to you by Egg Farmers of Canada.

Welcome to Toronto. Thank you so much. It's absolutely wonderful. Well, Leslie Jamison came to the ideas studio during her visit to Toronto. We shifted the focus from personal essays to another abiding concern in her writing. Empathy. Most people would agree that empathy is one of humanity's best qualities, that empathy is one of the things that makes us human, and that we could use more of it. But Leslie examines empathy from all angles and finds that it is no simple thing. Empathy may be one of our highest callings and core to who we are as human beings, but accordingly, it's as complex and contradictory as humans, and as imperfect as humans. She points out the impossibility of fully knowing or comprehending another person's experience, and argues that we need to try

anyway while acknowledging the limits of understanding. I asked her what she learned about empathy in her work as a medical actor, an experience she writes about in the book that made her name as a non-fiction writer, the empathy exams. So this was at the University of Iowa, it's a teaching hospital, and they would hire actors, I mean, amateur, I'm not a professional actor, so they would hire people to play what they called standardized patients. And a standardized patient basically has a dossier letting you know how you would manifest having a particular condition, whether that condition is preeclampsia, alcoholism, one of the

cases that I specialized in was something called conversion disorder where essentially a female patient was having seizures that were expressions of unresolved grief about her brother's death. So in each case, you would have the symptoms, you would have the ways that you were supposed to answer certain questions, and the idea was to test medical students on how well they were able to gather information from a patient, and also how well they were able to display concern and empathy. So when I was done with an encounter, I would literally fill out a checklist. You know, did they ascertain this piece of information, this piece of information? And then there was one item on the checklist that was, how well did the medical student express empathy?

And there was something about the oddness of that question, of turning it into a kind of rubric where you were going to give a numerical, I think it was a score of one to five that just, it was the oddness of it that first sort of struck me and made me think, am I essentially just saying, did they say the words, you know, that must be really hard or what would I use to evaluate how well they shouldn't? And it got me thinking, you know, part of what empathy is isn't just, okay, saying, oh, that sounds hard or that sounds painful, but it's actually manifest in asking more follow-up questions, showing that one has listened to what's been said and from that listening has a deeper or sharpened curiosity. But that experience of evaluating empathy in this,

like, you know, kind of stilted, sometimes even absurd-feeling environment, you know, for my preeclampsia case, I had a pillow strapped around my chest, you know. But it got me thinking, well, what do we really mean when we use this word? We use this word a lot, but what are we actually trying to say. And so it prompted this deeper and more far-ranging investigation. And part of what I really came to feel was that often when people use the word empathy, they are meaning something like knowing or inhabiting the mental or emotional state of another person. But we can never fully know what another person is thinking or feeling. And so I came to really believe that accepting the limits of what's possible is an important part of empathy as well, knowing that we have to maintain

a certain kind of humility when it comes to understanding other people, and that gets back to kind of curiosity and question asking as important components of empathy rather than making assumptions as kind of the bedrock of what empathy is. There's so much to unpack there, of course, but I do want to go back to the oddness of the experience of grading empathy, kind of as a sharp example of what we do maybe on a day-to-day basis. And so at some point, you realize that, in fact, you are grading the people. your life on their ability to have empathy. Is that what we're all doing? Yeah, I think when I started to work as a medical actor, I certainly started to think about times in my own life when I had, you know, without calling it that, essentially been grading other people or care practitioners in terms of how much or how well they had exhibited empathy towards me. And in particular, I went back to two medical experiences that I had had shortly before starting to work as a medical

actor. One was a fairly involved experience of heart surgery, and the other was an abortion. And in both cases, I remember feeling, you know, at certain points misunderstood or doctors or my partner were making assumptions about what I might be feeling or not actually asking very much about what I was feeling. And I started to have this, you know, kind of an embarrassed sense that there had been some little person sitting in my mind with a pen and a scorecard saying, well, that wasn't exactly what I wanted. But then I think this is true for a lot of us. We can feel very certain, well, that wasn't what I wanted? But what is it that we did want? You know, and so that became one of the questions that I was pursuing in that essay as well. What was it that we do crave when we want some level of understanding or attention from other people and then maybe what parts of us feel ashamed for wanting it at all? I love this idea that you introduce us to that empathy kind of requires a kind of porousness on both sides, vulnerability and an openness on one side and humility and, as you say, curiosity and understanding on the other. Yeah, one of the phrases that started to loom really large for me when I started to think about empathy was that warning that you'll sometimes hear on the subway like mind the gap, you know, mind the gap when you step from the platform to the car.

But mind the gap in terms of recognizing that your life, your interiority, the forces that have produced you, that every life is a different land in a way. And that something about empathy is a kind of border crossing where you're trying to understand more about what it's like to be in this other country of another person. But that it's so important to always start from the assumption that I can't assume anything about what they feel or how they've lived. And so my empathy is much more about listening than presuming. It's much more about sort of starting from that place of what do I not know about you. And so what questions can I ask? How can I be surprised by you? How can I try to put aside the assumptions that I'm not even aware of because they're so baked into my own sense of what it feels like to be alive. So by acknowledging what I don't know, I can lay the groundwork for knowing more. Yeah. But as a writer and a journalist, I wonder how much. much of what you do, how far would you go to close that gap? I mean, I am a rabid asker of questions. I honestly just bring a genuine curiosity about what is it like for other people to be alive and how is it different from my own experience of being alive. And I'm also just a big believer

in the follow-up question as a distinct category of question by which in a sense that you are an expert at this as well. You know, questions as distinct from, you know, I have my bullet-pointed list of questions that I'm going to move through them. And the follow-up question to me is something that's intricately forged based on what the other person has said. And sort of once you receive that and can try to really internalize that information, you can ask questions that are much more honed into another person's experience. So the idea of walking into interviews often starting out not knowing that much about the specialty of the person I'm interviewing, you just have to bring a spirit of curiosity and adventure. And for me, I had to try to stop worrying so

much about seeming smart or seeming like I knew everything and really just be invested in what are the questions that might open this person up. How can we really get into a meaningful conversation where I'm driven, not by ego, but by curiosity? How extraordinary to have somebody guide students, you know, on that kind of thinking, you know, the curiosity necessary, but also the humility and the willingness to fail, even if, you know, an encounter is difficult. And I have to say I really, I learned so much from teaching as well. I teach at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, which is a graduate program and my teach in the nonfiction program. And, you know, my students are doing a wide range of work, often in similar ways to my own work. So I feel that I'm also trying to help them figure out, like, how do they want to draw from their own experience? How do they want to try to penetrate and incorporate and draw on the experiences of other people? And more than anything, I want to be showing them that it's not, these aren't mutually exclusive modes. I think sometimes people can get labeled as either, okay, you're a journalist and there's no I, there's no first person presence in your work or you're a memoirist and you kind of only care about yourself. And for me, neither one of those has felt like a natural way of thinking about what nonfiction writing can be. If we think of nonfiction as art made from. life, it makes a lot of sense to me that a given writer might be really interested in their

own experience and also in the experiences of other people. So I try to sort of help students figure out how they want to draw on multiple streams in terms of how they're making art from what's actually been lived. Which raises an interesting thing about your work, which is the evolution in the way you think about empathy as you write about it. And kind of moving away from it being just this benign, beautiful thing and talking about, as you call them, pitfalls and perils of empathy? The pitfalls and the perils of empathy, deepening awareness of the pitfalls and perils of empathy really came from paying close attention to what was happening both in my personal relationships and in my journalistic encounters. So trying to pay close attention to those

moments when I was, you know, projecting my own experiences or desires unto another person rather than trying to recognize what they were sharing with me about their own experiences. The kind of tendency to almost want to feel virtuous and to sort of engage an empathic action or empathic conversation because I liked how it made me feel about myself. You know, I mean, so there's an essay I wrote about patients who experience something called Morgelons disease, which is basically a condition where patients believe that there are strange, unexplainable fibers emerging from their skin. So I got very interested in what is this condition and what is it like to experience this

condition went to a morguellen's conference in austin texas where i met a number of people who suffer from this condition you know most doctors would categorize morgelons disease is basically a subset of delusional parasitosis so it's a condition of the mind not the body but i became really interested in well okay even if what's happening to these people is slightly different from their conception of what's happening to them how are they still enduring a very real kind of suffering. So it was like, okay, maybe empathy isn't always just taking at face value someone's account of their own experience. There can be certain kinds of skepticism or interrogation or resistance, even that can be part of the experience of empathy. And sometimes

disagreement and friction can also be part of the experience of empathy. But it still, to me, ultimately comes back to trying to listen hard to somebody else's account of what life feels like for them and granting some importance to that account as well. I'm curious about that conversation about maybe in some of these cases that you write about, almost that having someone hear and understand the story, the condition they're living is almost more important than actually dealing with the condition itself. I mean, certainly I think there's often a tremendous value to just being heard and to experiencing another human being essentially telling you through their listening, through their presence, through their close engagement, you matter and what you're experiencing matters. And part of this is the nature of the work I do. I don't interview presidents. I don't interview celebrities.

I don't interview people who have been asked about their lives and their experiences a thousand times. I interview people who often feel forgotten or invisible, and so there's a hunger they bring to the encounter and often a kind of solace just in being heard. I mean, it creates a different dilemma sometimes, which is that they might be, whether they admit it to themselves or not, understanding the journalistic encounter as one in which basically the version of their own story that they have in their minds is going to be reproduced pretty precisely by the journalist. that they can kind of offer their account and then have me as somebody who's going to, you know, essentially faithfully like a stenographer, we produce that account. And it's not always what's going to happen. So there can be a feeling of there's the risk of a certain feeling of betrayal if in doing your job as a journalist, which is to offer an account of somebody's experience that is slightly different from the account

that they themselves would offer, how to have that process always textured by respect and a granting of dignity to somebody else that doesn't just involve having to hue precisely and totally and unequivocally to their own version of themselves. Yeah. I can really relate to that, having written the field and interviewed people with really horrendous stories and who really kind of entrust you. They give you this, almost like this baby, and ask you to take care of it. And it's hard to find that balance, but this relationship between you as a journalist or an

essayist and the people you write about, it is kind of a call. complicated relationship. And you talk about how the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm said that journalists are a bit like con artists. That really resonates with me. How are we or you like con artists? Yeah. So Janet Malcolm is one of the great voices on the psychological intricacies of the relationship between journalists and subject. And I think she writes with unnerving, unflinching accuracy about the ways that, you know, essentially a subject can often come to a journalist almost the way that somebody might come to a priest offering confession. You know, here's this tale that is so close to my heart, such a central part of my experience. And when I

give it to you, what you're going to offer me is total acceptance and total absolution. And in that way, she compares it often to the kind of dynamic with the mother, where you're hoping for total nurturing, total acceptance. But that I think part of the feeling of the journalist as a con artist comes from, but I thought you were receiving my story with total acceptance, a zero judgment, and that part of what comes out in the actual final account does include often opinions, some level of interpretation, and that interpretation of itself can sometimes feel like judgment or feels like rejection or it feels like betrayal. And so I think there can be a real sense of guilt as somebody who's trying to deal with other people's stories with such care and to grant them a lot of

dignity and the writing of their stories, but also wants to do due diligence in also being a kind of a thoughtful narrator of other people's experiences. So, you know, I don't think the journalist is a con artist, but I think that there's a kind of friction in that transition from like, I'm here with you, absolutely. I'm just listening. I'm affirming what you're telling me. And then, you know, to hear the smoothly polished prose of the final account can feel like, well, am I, are you, was I a stranger to you? Was our encounter not what I thought it was? And, you know, you often realize, and sometimes this will come up in the fact-checking process where the fact-checkers kind of digging into these parts of the story and the subject thought the core of the story was one thing, but to me, maybe the core of the story was something else. And putting the weight on different parts of the conversation, I think, can be sometimes an unnerving or disconcerting part of things. Because even though I really try to do my due diligence as a reporter, still, inevitably I end up getting an idea in my mind about what somebody was saying. And then the fact tracker comes back and says, you know, they really said it happened a little bit of a different way.

And again, I think we have to approach people initially with a lot of humility. But I also think we have to keep that humility like a live wire inside of us because memory is always arranging what happened to fit the kind of theses that we've developed in our minds about it. So I think staying humble about the limits of your own memory, but to recognize that, you know, inevitably, my version of events will have distorted in all these ways that I'm not fully aware of and how to kind of build an understanding of that into the process of trying to represent the truth. Yeah. Yeah. The truth. Wow. There's that elusive thing. Yes, exactly. Not a monolith. Yeah. As we talked about earlier in this conversation, you know, empathy is not straightforward. It's

not uncomplicated, the double negative. You write about kind of this inherent tension. between the givingness of empathy and what we get out of being empathetic. Can you explain that tension? So I think there's a few things happening at once in any exchange that we say might involve empathy. We're trying to give something to another person. We're trying to give them our attention. We're trying to give them our compassion. We're trying to give them our listening and our understanding and our emotional investment in their experience.

So all of these are real and important forms of giving. But there's also something we're getting out of it, which is, feeling good about ourselves, feeling like this is a virtuous and worthwhile thing what I'm doing, listening and caring about another person's experience. And I guess I want to urge people to both be aware of the ways in which we're affirming or bolstering or buffering some part of ourselves that there is something we're getting out of it. But I'm also very wary of understanding that as a polluting or contaminating force. Like I don't think that good action or real empathy has to involve absolutely nothing coming back to the self, because that's just not realistic. And I think it engages in false fantasies of purity that don't feel productive to me. So this idea that a good action is immediately invalidated by the fact that it feels good to do it. And I think if we try to kind of decontaminate ourselves so that empathy is entirely selfless and brings nothing back to us, I think that actually makes it a sort of stilted one-way

exchange that has a kind of condescension built into it. And some of it for me probably comes back to my own experience. And in recovery and fellowship-based recovery, I think there's a strong sense in recovery that we help each other also because it helps us. And that that's not a liability. It's actually a force that makes the whole enterprise more enduring, gives it a kind of staying power. And to me, there's a kind of humbling in that as well. Like, it's not just that you need something for me. It's that I need something from you. There's a mutual. there that I really believe in. What do you think, this is a big one, but what do you think is the relationship between empathy, understanding, and voyeurism?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think even being aware of the risk of voyeurism is itself a way to try to guard against that experience of other people's stories. I mean, I think the difference comes down to both depth of engagement and maybe the, texture of the pleasure that arises from that engagement. So by depth of engagement, I mean, I think sometimes voyeuristic encounters with other people's stories engage only with the, or mostly with the sensational surface of those stories. So, oh, that was so horrible. Look at, you know. Train wreck. Yeah. These images of starving children are bombed out structures. I mean, you know, in the past two years, but before that even, we've all become kind of horrifically

familiar with and this sense of kind of feeling an adrenaline rush or even the kind of electric thrill of finding something horrible and hating the people who did it and feeling somehow like it's terrible that these people are suffering but never really penetrating deeper than that. I do think there's a kind of that that's some of how I describe the texture of the voyeuristic encounter. But I think the deep engagement with, you know, what is it actually feel like to be inside of those experiences? What is it like in the aftermath? What is it like, you know, for the mother of the child dealing with malnutrition, you know, six months down the line, like just trying to stay with all the levels of other people's stories

insofar as that's possible, you know, and it's always going to be mediated and one's awareness of other people's lives is always going to be partial. There's always going to be that unnerving whiplash effect of kind of engaging with other people's suffering and then returning to, you know, pick up your kid from school and make dinner. And I think there's always going to be something that feels wrong and indefensible about that. But I think just trying to engage with other people's lives and with everything that's broken about the world and then deal with the feelings of guilt and irresolution that result from the fact that, like, you haven't been able to solve anything for them. You just do what you can. You show up with attention or you try

to donate whatever resources are available to you to donate. And, you know, so just that, that sense of a kind of feeling of messy, unresolved, unvirtuous, self-implicating, have all of those be features of the encounter? Like, that sounds a lot more like empathy, whereas the kind of like, that's terrible, I'm good, I'm feeling okay about it because I've done my time and listened to the story. Like, I don't know, anything that feels sort of overly resolved or ends on a note of okayness feels a little bit more like voyeurism to me. Yeah.

I don't know how I'm so curious. how you would think about that question. Oh, my God, I have 20 thoughts. But no, it's kind of a daily now that we all see each other's stories and have the option of learning about the horrors of the world, no matter where we stand on this earth, that question is constant. And it should be in my books. Like, where do we, how much empathy can we have and how much,

what can we do about what is going on in the world? But I imagine that part of the struggle, and I certainly felt that when I was in the field, is who deserves empathy? Who does deserve the deep telling of a story the way you might handle their story? Whereas all kinds of people who deserve empathy and the storytelling

never have their story told. Absolutely. Yeah, I think holding that question as a question is important rather than feeling that one has definitively resolved it. I mean, I think I never even had a goal for myself that I would be in any way a representative, or comprehensive teller of other people's stories or that I would even be able to come close to

approaching all of those stories that, as you say, absolutely deserve to be told. So I think I very much focus on a kind of fit where it's like, where have I found a story that I think I bring something interesting to the telling and also there are some profundities and interesting tensions kind of waiting to be told. And for me, there is something that feels important about telling stories that might not be the loudest or brightest stories on other people's radar screens and that maybe, you know, I sometimes feel that I'm interested in forms of suffering or psychic pain that are easily misunderstood, whether it's a disease that people would be quick to call delusional. And I have an impulse to be like, but actually, there's still suffering there and what does that suffering look like? Or, you know, I recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker about perfectionism. And I think that's a, in a very different way, a form of suffering that's kind of easy to dismiss. Okay, that's like, what you say in the job interview when you're trying to identify a flaw that actually looks really good. You're humble bragging. Exactly. But I think real perfectionism kind of takes a deep psychic and often physical toll and it's highly correlated with suicidality. I mean, there's just there is a lot at stake. And so again, I think there's an impulse in me to sort of look past the first blush of what might be dismissed and find something beyond it. But there's no part of me that thinks my personal mandate is going to cover all the stories. out there worth telling. And I think there's an anguish in knowing exactly as you say that there are

so many stories out there that do deserve to be told and won't be. Yeah. One of the recurring theme that I want to touch on in your essay is that you're continually surprised and humbled by the people that you talk to and write about. And the more you get to know them, the more surprised you are. Yeah, I just want to really underscore that for me, surprise has moral valances in a way that I'm not sure people always think about surprise in terms of morality, but I think a willingness to be surprised is ethically admirable and important quality because I think a willingness to be surprised means you're staying open to other people and not locking them into your presumptions or ideas about who they are, what they're capable of. And I just, I think that we stay alive to

each other when we're willing to be surprised by each other. Everybody is a lot of things and is produced by a lot of experiences. We keep getting little bits of the curtain revealed to show them different parts of who they are or what they've lived. And depending on what's visible to us, we might have very different conclusions about how we feel about them or what we want to give them. So in a way, a willingness to be open to surprise is kind of almost a precondition for empathy. I think so. I think so. Because, you know, fundamentally other people's experiences aren't known to us until we get to know them. So there should be a lot that's surprising there. If you look at kind of the things that defined 2025 so far in the United States and beyond, to some extent, it's been polarization, tribalism, political violence, mass roundups of immigrants, trans people being made out to be a menace in society, I could keep going.

What do you think is the state of empathy right now? What's happened to it? Where is it? Yeah, I think empathy is in short supply, which is not. Not to say there aren't many people kind of fighting for it. And I feel like one of the few rays of political hope for me as a resident of the city of New York was Sam Zorans. I mean, he hasn't won it yet. But the idea of Zoran becoming our mayor and is somebody who I think really embodies a lot of qualities of empathy and really shies away from political modes, you know, so deeply embodied by Trump and his kind of cohort that, you know, willfully. produce, coax out, and capitalize on the potential inside people to turn their own suffering into blame hatred, racism, xenophobia. I mean, lots of people are living difficult lives that they feel are fundamentally invisible to establishment politics, that they have not been served by establishment politics. And Trump has sort of swept in and taken their discontent and asked them to feel like somehow it will be solved by rounding up immigrants who haven't

done a single thing wrong and deporting them. And so I do think that things like deep and humble engagements with other people's experiences can be a kind of antidote, but I would be lying if I said I knew exactly how to get there. But keeping that in mind, do you still think it is possible for empathy to be real, even with the gulfs that we see and the divisions that we see? Yeah. I really do believe that there is a capacity for love and capacity. and interest in the lives of others and curiosity and care about the lives of others in pretty much every human being. And because I think that's there in pretty much every human being, I do think it's possible to build a society that's much less broken than what America is today. I haven't lost that faith.

And actually, my daughter, who's seven, she's heard me say enough times that I don't think any person is all bad that she likes to tease me about it. you know, when she's encountering Darth Vader and Star Wars, I know, you don't think everybody's all bad. I'll be like, yeah, look, he actually had a whole capacity for love that was just like turned to the dark side. You know, so, you know, I do maintain that faith in the human capacity for love and the human capacity in a way to relate to one's own suffering in a way that doesn't kind of translate into causing the suffering of others. But, you know, again, I that faith is sometimes tested by, you know, everything I see unfolding around me. And there's certainly, you know, just a long road to kind of building a different version of the country than the one we're inside of right now. You write, quote, I don't believe in a finite economy of empathy, I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it takes. You learn to start seeing, unquote.

Is that what it takes just to pay attention? Yeah, and I think it can sometimes feel like, you know, it's not worth paying attention to this form of suffering or this person's experience because they're not suffering. as much as this other person over here. And, you know, and I do think it's worth thinking critically about where we direct our focus and how we direct our focus and maybe the people who haven't been seen as fully or as frequently or have a different claim on our attention than once whose stories, you know, like it comes back to this idea of like building and practicing certain muscles. I think that paying attention to other people's experiences, no matter what lives those experiences reside in, it sort of can tune you into just a way of being where you can

care more deeply about a kind of wide range of experiences. So I'm interested in just developing those practices of seeing, listening, cultivating one's own sense of kind of unknowing and the curiosity that's born of that sense of unknowing. And thinking about that as a renewable resource rather than, you know, something that you have a, you start with a finite supply and then you chip a little bit off the block every time. Leslie Jameson, what a joy to talk to you. Thank you so much. What a pleasure to talk to you, Nala. Thank you so much for having me.

That was Leslie Jameson in the flesh in our ideas studio in Toronto. She's the author of acclaimed books like The Empathy Exams and The Recovery. And she's the winner of the 2025 Western International Award for Nonfiction. Special thanks to the Writers' Trust of Canada. This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow. Our website is cbc.ca.ca slash ideas, and you can find us on the CBC News app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, technical production Emily Kjavazio, senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.