Book Review: Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison
Jamie Singleton reviews Leslie Jamison’s latest collection of essays, Make It Scream, Make it Burn.
In the first season of Lena Dunham’s Girls, only hours before Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath is to read an essay before a group of distinguished writers, intellectuals and prospective publishers, her condescending boss, Ray, asks her, “What could be more trivial than intimacy?”
By the end of the episode, it becomes glisteningly obvious that believing Ray was Hannah’s only mistake: she writes a poorly received essay, and forfeits her hopes of riding it into a career. It begs a simple question: what is triviality? How do we identify it, and what do we do with it?
Leslie Jamison’s latest collection of essays, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, reveals to us that the every-day experience is precisely where the substance of our culture — what makes life worth living — is found. In the essay “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live”, which investigates the validity of a family’s (the father’s mostly) insistence that their son is a reincarnated fighter pilot, she points out that the family “turned quotidian experiences into symptoms of an exotic existential phenomenon.” Jamison largely challenges their claims, but holds on to the sentiment throughout. What Girls’ Ray would call “trivial” becomes the raison d’être of the family.
Jamison announces this herself in the brief essay, ‘A Layover Story’, in which she finds the meaning in the “meaningless” things her fellow passengers tell her. After being shown a collection of hermit crab shells another passenger is transporting so that other crabs might be able to use them, she writes: “Perhaps there is profundity in this. We claim something not by making it, but by making it useful.”
As is the case for this collection’s predecessor, The Empathy Exams, many of the essays are pooled from work she has produced as a reporter. Yet the book maintains a feeling of remarkable continuity, probably because she seems concerted in her efforts not merely on “making” her writing, but “making it useful”.
In Make it Scream, Make it Burn, Jamison revisits James Agee’s Let us Now Praise Famous Men, a work documenting the lives of three families living in abject poverty in rural Alabama. A graduate of various literary courses, Jamison is unsurprisingly acute in her attentiveness to the language which shapes Agee’s role. There’s a sense of manifest destiny in his hypnotic syntax, a grammatical insistence on the fulfilment of desire: I like to … and will; I like to … and will; I like to … and will. He fantasises about camaraderie and distraction. He wants to be delivered from his own interior life. He’s done too much hard time with too many sonnet writers in Harvard Yard. He wants out.
The painful paradox is that getting out is getting into something else. Agee’s book describes the impoverished families he records, but “also forces us into the anguish of his attempt to do this describing, as if his attempt were another house”. Jamison calls this “self-sabotaging journalism”, but this is only because both she and Agee see language failing to complete the task it presumes. When she notes that “The documentary ‘I’ rarely documents without doing some damage”, she implicates herself in that “self-sabotage”. An inability to properly document is a failure, one in a long line of them, she says, but “all of them beautiful”. It boils down, again, to a question of utility: even something which has been sabotaged can have value.
The collection is a broad church. She records her experience in the war-torn north of Sri Lanka, a place she was commissioned to visit, with less than 24-hours’ notice, to write an article for a travel magazine; she tells the story of Annie Appel, an American photographer who spent twenty-five summers photographing a Mexican family. In “Sim Life”, she takes a before-the-screen look at virtual reality game, Second Life, and tries to understand how some users really do make second lives for themselves — most finding far more fulfilment there than here. Unceasingly critical and perceptive, she builds her intuitions from the finest threads, and makes the value of video games resonate hardly less than the lifelong tensions of a family drama.
Following a well-documented modern literary shift into a more resonantly personal method of writing, it is Jamison’s deepest experiences that hold pride of place in the collection. These are no doubt works of literary sophistication, but that takes nothing away from their raw personal power. The closing essay, “The Quickening”, a deeply personal address from Jamison to her infant child, is the highlight of the book.
The essay is an ode to the body, the attenuated negative-self of her earlier years of starvation, contrasted and then overwhelmed by the full-blooded pregnant body of the bracing mother: “to satisfy the tiny second set of organs…extra blood swelled me”. The imagery is rich and responsive as her body generates another one, almost religious in its evocation of two lives in one: “[I] swam naked in a pool at night…while your kicks swelled under my skin like waves” – two bodies and the world in synchronicity. Giving up what you might understand as your life can be a terrifying prospect, but Jamison finds the fruit there. She sees that the end of pain is often beauty: “There you were: an arrival, a cry, the beginning of another world.”