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.
"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
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