The Empathy Exams

Ex-Votos

Jamison describes the artist Frida Kahlo’s reliance on plaster corsets to keep herself upright due to an injury that damaged her spine. She painted them to make them beautiful even as she desired her need for them to vanish. Jamison then describes Kahlo’s relationship with her husband Diego Rivera and copies snippets of the artist’s journals discussing her partner. Jamison describes the amputation of Kahlo’s leg and her endless affection for her doctors, who tried so hard to keep her body functioning after surviving polio and the streetcar accident that crippled her. She describes the accident and then Kahlo’s Catholic faith and her collection of saintly pictures called ex-votos. The pictures represent the artist’s physical anguish contrasted with her mental fortitude, which is further explored in the final diary page Jamison describes, in which two women face each other and are torn between hate and pity.

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Jamison recounts Joan Didion’s Salvador, in which she goes to the mall for water purification tablets and finds aisles and aisles of imported goods. El Salvador is in the middle of a civil war based on the idea of avoiding the outside influences of foreign countries as Didion looks at the imported items and grapples with the

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