Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story

by Leslie Jamison

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

This poignant and pointedly hilarious personal narrative explores the dichotomy of the human condition—the joys and sorrows, the gains and losses.

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 is among our most beloved contemporary voices, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. In Splinters, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of her most intimate relationships: new motherhood, a ruptured marriage, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once, Jamison juxtaposes the magical and the mundane in surprising ways. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, a deep reckoning that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.
 
How do we move forward into joy while haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page, full of the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics. A master of nonfiction, Jamison evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316374989
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	02/11/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

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.
 

Editorial Reviews

"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

“Filled with heart, humor and unsparing insights, her searing memoir is a standout."—People (Book of the Week)

“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

“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

"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 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 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

“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

“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

“Splinters is an exquisite, textured and precise articulation of the collapse of [a] marriage . . . exhilarating . . . beautiful.”—Sarah Menkedick, New York Times

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

"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

"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

"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

“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

"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

“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

“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

"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!

“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 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 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

“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

From the Publisher

12/15/2023

Jamison (The Recovering) takes readers on a candid, insightful, whirlwind journey as she gives birth to her daughter and concurrently ends her marriage. Along the way, she visits and revisits what it means to be a family, art (and the making of it), the ups and downs of love and approval-seeking, and the dilemmas, joys, and challenges of single motherhood. Loosely organized, the book has sections with one-word titles such as "Smoke," in which she describes the finality of her divorce and also sublets a firehouse; and "Fever," which starts at the beginning of the pandemic. There's certainly humor in this book as well. Preceding each section is a fascinating and hilarious list of all she has been googling. VERDICT A literary memoir filled with humor, which alone is worth reading the book. This title offers insight and a look into the messy, magical drudgery of life, along with the beauty of art, love, and sex that often carry people through.—Amy Cheney

Library Journal

Essayist and novelist Leslie Jamison chooses the tone and pacing of her narration as carefully as she selects the details of her powerful writing. These qualities, along with her candidness, invite listeners deep into her memories, which include the flower-filled hospital room where she stayed after delivering her daughter and desperate Internet searches for relief from her infant's continual crying. Descriptions are sometimes visceral, but Jamison blends them with wit, humor, and lyrical imagery that allow a bit of distance. Jamison's transitions can be fast but are always discernible and intriguing whether she's speaking of growing up, motherhood, divorce, dating, book tours, or single parenting during the pandemic. Her loneliness, guilt, and grief are mitigated by the insights and self-compassion she finds by the audio's end. S.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2024 - AudioFile

2023-10-13
The essayist and novelist makes motherhood central to a memoir about love, guilt, and grief.

Jamison and her husband had been in couples’ therapy for three years by the time their daughter was born—an event that intensified their marital problems. When the author’s mother came to help her in the first weeks, her husband felt shut out, and as Jamison exulted in motherhood, he became increasingly bitter and resentful. “Did honoring my vows mean figuring out how to make a daily home with C’s anger?” Jamison asked herself. Motherhood changed her perceptions. “Those first months,” she writes, “made the everyday visible again.” At times overwhelmed by the “sudden and exhausting plenitude” of mothering, Jamison was enchanted by her daughter’s body, her needs, and her marvelous discovery of the world. Once she and her husband separated, though, she confronted the burden of single parenting, “the overwhelm of managing her presence without help,” and the ongoing pressure of juggling child care, writing, and teaching. Much of the memoir focuses on Jamison’s ambivalence about divorce. Finally, she realizes that grief about her divorce “did not have to wear the clothes of guilt.” She reflects on her own childhood as the daughter of divorced parents, someone who rarely saw the father she wanted desperately to please; her relationship with her ever-patient, ever-helpful mother; her anorexia and alcoholism; and the men she dated once her daughter began spending two nights a week with C. The “wild vacillations of melodrama” of those affairs revealed her repetitive pattern of “turning men into assignments. Make him faithful. Make him fall in love with you.” A lesson she keeps learning, she admits, is the “difference between the story of love and the texture of living it, the story of motherhood and the texture of living it.”

Candid, intimate recollections on motherhood and commitment.

Kirkus Reviews