Skip to main content

Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison, a VQR editor at large, is the author of the nonfiction books The Recovering (Little, Brown, 2018), The Empathy Exams (Graywolf, 2014), and most recently the essay collection Make It Scream, Make It Burn (Little, Brown, 2019), as well as the novel The Gin Closet (Free Press, 2010). Her reported essay “The Breakup Museum,” from the Spring 2018 issue of VQR, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Essays & Criticism. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.

Author

Cecily Brown, <i>The Girl Who Had Everything,</i> 1998. Oil on linen, 100 x 110 inches.  (© Cecily Brown. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever.)

Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain

Spring 2014 | Essays

The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars.