Leslie Jamison on Quarantine & Magic Time

“One thing that I’ve found to be true about quarantine is the over-presence of the past because the present is stripped away. I’ve always been a creature of the past. I’ve always felt flooded and hounded and haunted by memory, but I found that it’s almost like present experience quieting down has left this room that the past has come in to flood.”

Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, Make It Scream Make It Burn, and the novel The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Photo credit: Nathan Perkel.