At Lit Hub, a former student talks with Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, about expressions of emotion in personal essays and why “confession and sentimentality [are] taboo.” For Jamison, the investigation of writing emotion began in her MFA program: “I hated this sort of smug assumption that we all knew what was bad.” At the same time, Jamison says, “I was deeply afraid of being seen as someone who was making too much out of a personal experience that actually wasn’t that hard.”