About the Book
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes "a blazing, unputdownable memoir" (Mary Karr, author of Lit), the "piercing, intimate" story (TIME Magazine) of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage--an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love. Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material--scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books--Splinters enters a new realm.
In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents' complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once--a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover--Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.
How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we've caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page, full of linguistic daring and emotional acuity. Jamison, a master of nonfiction, evinces once again her ability to "stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon" (NPR).
About the Author :
Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams; the collection of essays Make It Scream, Make It Burn, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. 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, among many others. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.
Review :
"Splinters is an exquisite, textured and precise articulation of the collapse of [a] marriage . . . exhilarating . . . beautiful."--Sarah Menkedick, New York Times
"Jamison has always been bracingly honest about her experiences, and yet her books have always been about the world as much as herself . . . This is true of Splinters, too, in which Jamison transforms her personal tale into one about a set of often unanswerable questions relating to love, marriage, and motherhood . . . She weaves a story of marital friction and motherly love that is as much about the world as it is a reflection on the self."
--The Nation
"A candid and perceptive look at divorce, motherhood, and personal reinvention. . . . With unbridled vulnerability, Jamison writes of being a child of divorce, the challenges of dating as a single mom, and the overwhelming nature of juggling childcare and working. Splinters is a window into how difficult it is to pick up the pieces of one's own life while caring for another."
--Time
"A prolific 40-year-old memoirist, Jamison has already chronicled her alcoholism and her anorexia, among other trials. Her talents as a writer allow these exercises in self-exposure to transcend self-indulgence, but she is wise about her impulse to transform the muck of life into artful prose . . . Her work is vivid with detail, and she is thoughtful on motherhood, which both undercuts and enhances her sense of self. "
--Economist
"Jamison delivers a searing account of divorce and the bewildering joys of new motherhood, cementing her status as one of America's most talented self-chroniclers."--New York Times Editors' Choice
"Jamison's Splinters is a refreshingly ambitious memoir that seeks to bridge this divide by showing us why child-rearing is as much about diapers and sleepless nights and as it is about heartbreak and hope. She reminds us that even if we aren't or never will be a parent or caregiver ourselves, we undoubtedly love someone who is."--Hippocampus Magazine
"Splinters is at its core a love story about a woman falling in love with her daughter (while falling out of love with her husband). But it also recounts Jamison's odyssey: how to embrace motherhood without sacrificing all of one's other identities . . . Splinters is not just about motherhood; it is also, crucially, about the relationships that can often be subsumed by it -- friendships, marriages, creative collaborations."--San Francisco Chronicle
"A multi-themed tapestry whose threads are woven with precision and grace . . . Jamison digs deeply here, and Splinters overflows with vivid imagery and descriptions that animate her recollections . . . By the end of Splinters, Jamison achieves a sort of hard-earned peace . . . As this memoir reflects, she's the kind of person--and, above all, the kind of writer--whose life certainly will never go unexamined. We're all the beneficiaries of that gift."
--Bookreporter
"I don't know how to review a book so beautiful that it feels painful to share it with anyone else, so tender and raw that it feels sacrilegious to treat it as a mere piece of writing, with a writer so skillful and honest that it feels as if she is only writing for me . . . There are some books you just can't put down and there are some books that you have to put down after every few pages because they devour you, they turn you inside out to reveal raw skin, all the parts you like to keep hidden, and you feel like you have been squeezed hard, hugged tightly, coiled around by your own memories that you hadn't thought about for many years, or ever, and you have to stop and breathe"--Pragya Agarwal, Irish Times
"Fascinating and sometimes harrowing memoir... A book of unusually clear intelligence and compassion... You will keep thinking about it, remember moments and lines from it, its power increases over time rather than diminishes."--New York Times Culture Desk podcast
"Filled with heart, humor and unsparing insights, her searing memoir is a standout."--People (Book of the Week)
"I can't stand blue cheese but I'm pretty sure if Leslie Jamison wrote a book about it, I would: a. read it, b. love it and c. seriously reconsider my long-standing Gorgonzola bias. That's a shorthand way of saying that Jamison's essays are so compassionate and insightful that she interests you in topics you may not think you care about and shows you new ways to view topics you already do care about it. . . . Jamison is hilarious, with a dry and usually self-deprecating wit in which the jokes are so graceful and surprising that you may need to read them twice."--Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"In different variations of her signature, beautifully frank language, Jamison writes about her fantasy of stability and her uncertainty as to whether it's a dream she actually wants fulfilled. . . . In caring for her daughter, she finds -- at least on the page -- a way to live with it all, the sleeplessness and the joy, the rapture and the frustration, the immense love and the wish to have a single moment alone . . . She's a master at closing nearly every paragraph with what lands as an epiphany."--NPR
"Intriguing and poignant . . . Jamison manages here that most difficult of literary and psychological feats -- subtlety, nuance, and hard-earned empathy . . . Splinters is Leslie Jamison's most fearless, searching, vibrantly alive book yet"--Boston Globe
"Jamison's genius--a word I use without hyperbole--is her capaciousness, how she gives us the blushing baby and the shitty diapers, the sweeping romances and their residue. We see Jamison half-whirling like Rumi in the throes of ecstatic love for a new daughter, knowing her ecstasy is real because she renders it wholly, alongside the pulverizing lonelinesses of loving deeply. Splinters is a praise song for what remains unannihilated, what has been salvaged from a time--a world--of annihilation. I find in Jamison's work what I've sought my entire life: a rigorous and attentive steward for whom dailiness deepens, instead of diminishes, awe."--Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
"Splinters is Jamison operating at the height of her talents. A tale of Jamison's early motherhood and the end of her marriage, the book is unshrinking, nuanced, radiant, and so wondrously honest--a referendum on the splintered identities that complicate and comprise the artist, the wife, the mother, the woman."--Elle
"Her writing balances perfectly between the subtle and the sublime, crafting scenes of new love that make your heart soar and moments of deep loneliness that echo long after you've finished reading. Jamison perfectly draws connections between her most difficult experiences in love and motherhood with her own familial history and our culture's pressures on women, creating a textured and complex portrait of grief and eventual healing."--Chicago Review of Books
"Leslie Jamison 's memoir tells the story of the end of her marriage, but it is also an account of motherhood and the way that a life-transforming event can cause a woman to feel as though a part of herself has fractured. . . . It is also an exceptional read, guiding her reader through her thrilling and bitter and fulfilling affairs of the heart."--Vogue
"The pages of this first memoir are lit by flinty humor and grownup joy as thought and feeling are joined in prose that's intimate and exacting. It's never less than gripping . . . From the sharp fragments of Jamison's title she fashions a mother-daughter love story that reads like a classic."--The Guardian
"In this exquisite memoir . . . Jamison is brutally honest about the obstacles to balancing creative fulfillment, parenting, dating, and sobriety, utilizing her beguiling command of language to spotlight feelings often obscured in other accounts of motherhood . . . By turns funny, poignant, harrowing, and joyful, this standout personal history isn't easily forgotten"--Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Jamison is back with her most personal work yet: a memoir exploring the dissolution of her own marriage, the legacy of her parents' fraught relationship, and the terrifying, joyous promise of her young daughter's future. You'll need tissues and a highlighter for this one."--Oprah Daily
"You don't have to be a mother to find bone-deep truth in this memoir. You don't have to have loved hard and then lost, gone through a divorce with a kind man who turns cruel, or weathered the COVID-19 pandemic as a single working mom. You just have to be a person with a heart to feel the beauty, the pain and above all, the humanity that runs through this force of nature in book form."--Good Housekeeping
"Splinters is a stunning portrait of the intricate tapestry of human emotions. On every page, in exquisite prose, Jamison unearths moments of luminosity and grace amid pain. Giving language to fundamental experiences of love, grief, and parenthood all too often skirted past, this book is essential reading for anyone who cares about the power of language to help us find solace and recompense."
--Meghan O'Rourke, New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Kingdom
"Leslie Jamison's memoir, Splinters, is a stairway behind the eyes of a woman in the midst of transformation, written so brilliantly, and with such a skilled hand, that readers are likely to find themselves peacefully lost even in its darker moments. These pages are so magnetizing that I wanted to race along, but forced myself to slow down enough to savor the language. No one should be this good at writing. This gorgeous book will blow you away."--Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody's Daughter
"Splinters is as sharp and piercing as its title--a brilliant reckoning with what it means to make art, a self, a family, a life. If I were offered one guide as a writer, as a mother, as a teacher, as a human being constantly reinventing herself out of necessity, I'd want that guide to be Leslie Jamison. This memoir is a masterclass."
--Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
"An astounding achievement. This is a memoir of emotional depth that reminds us that love, in its fullness, is as much a construction of jagged and flinty edges as an ideal of cloudless skies. In Splinters, Leslie Jamison is unstinting in her assessment of marriage gained and lost, of motherhood held close, and of loving oneself in the process, all conveyed with her unsparing and attentive eye."--Esmé Weijun Wang, New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias
"Christ Almighty this book is good. It's a masterpiece. No one else I've read has captured motherhood--the painful overabundance of it, the extreme delight, the cascading fears--the way Leslie Jamison does in Splinters. No one else I've read has evoked so powerfully what it feels like to be pulled by too many competing tethers until you're half a mother, half a writer, barely a wife, hardly a real person. The electric truth at the heart of this book is that, in this shattering and reassembling, you're reorganized into a new kind of person, one attuned to abundance, open to chaos and surprise, gratified by the tiny pleasures of being alive. In Splinters, Jamison offers us an emotionally rich odyssey on the terrors and triumph of becoming whole."--Heather Havrilesky, author of Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage and the "Ask Polly" advice column
"I didn't realize I needed someone to write this book. As it turns out, I needed Leslie Jamison to write this book. It moved me so much and hooked me so quickly. I absolutely consumed it, this book about hunger and aftermath, about pleasure and beauty and silencing and speaking up, and that new language you get to invent and learn at the same time with your child. Splinters is enormously satisfying--full of passages, images, and ideas that are, quite simply, some of my favorite things I've ever read."--Mary-Louise Parker, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Mr. You, and Emmy, Golden Globe, and Tony Award winner
"In Splinters, Jamison offers a riveting portrait of rupture that is at once a page-turner about divorce, a romance about parenthood, a mystery of self after splintering, and a promise that however many times we break or are broken, art and love will never fail to mend us."
--Melissa Febos, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and national bestseller Girlhood
"Leslie Jamison's blazing memoir kept me riveted for the single day it took to guzzle it down. This wry, hilarious, and utterly unputdownable book is a gift that feels like an immediate hit and a forever classic."--Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of Lit and The Liar's Club
