But also a sometime alcohol addict and subject in her writing to unsparing self-analysis and -criticism.

Jamison is an interesting character, a Harvard undergraduate, Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum, and Yale literature PhD. I hope the reaction to that and to the party culture of this old and influential periodical will be measured, avoiding a right-versus-left safe-places train wreck.) It’s going to be interesting to see how she and the Review respond to the alleged sex behaviour of the former editor Loren Stein. She is a relatively unknown young former editor of another literary review. (Apropos: a quick digression about the Paris Review recently. I was impressed but my feelings ended up mixed, and I couldn’t identify with her dark vision of femininity, never mind finding a definition of an alternative to a phoney authentic self. But (all excited by Jamison’s insight) I wondered what, according to this very smart lady, that would be? So I looked her up and downloaded this collection of essays. But this interrogation was according to Jamison really a quest for “an utterly authentic self”, which she refers to as a fantasy.Īn escape in other words, from what we really ought to be doing. A former husband of her mother was an American hippie trying (or at least giving the appearance to himself and others of trying) to be “unfettered by norms, absolutely free”, and also “interrogat(ing his)… obsession with coolness”. Some of its insights caught my attention. I Met Fear on the Hill is a recent essay by Jamison published in Paris Review (227).

The empathy exams