Leslie Jamison is the author of two essay collections— The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn—a critical memoir, The Recovering, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She’s written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer.   Her new book is called Splinters. Jamison teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration.

We talked about how structure can be the answer to figuring out how to get a story on the page, the process of writing versus vetting it for the public, how time and perspective can bring spaciousness, the many selves that we exist as, and Google searches as confessions.

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