Leslie Jamison Writes Into the Trouble

Leslie Jamison’s memoir, Splinters , is available now from Little, Brown, so we asked her a few questions about writing, reading, alternative professions, and more. * How do you tackle writers’ block? Back in my youth, I tackled writers’ block in the time-honored ways: binge drinking and massive amounts of baking. I did so much baking during my MFA days, in fact (largely chocolate chip potato chip cookies, banana cream pies, and Jell-O shots, which is baking, right?) that I actually developed a word for it: procrastibaking. These days I smile fondly when I meet a fellow procrastibaker in the wild: a student who *always* has baked goods to share. Actually, what do I know? Maybe they are hitting every deadline *and* baking up a storm. These days, I tend to procrastinate in more slyly self-thwarting ways: by taking on even more assignments and projects to distract me from the ones I’m having trouble finishing. I wouldn’t recommend this method. The math doesn’t add up! * What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Almost fifteen years ago, my greatest teacher, Charlie D’Ambrosio, told me something so simple and profound about writing essays that it not only changed how I write essays, it changed how I write anything. Honestly, it changed how I lived. He said, “Sometimes the problem with an essay can become its subject.” I think he meant that rather than attempting to answer a question, or resolve it—somehow “get rid of it” so that it wasn’t getting in the way anymore—I could turn the question into the next occasion for rumination, narration, and reckoning, and that this wrestling could illuminate something that would have remained invisible otherwise. Where has this advice taken me? Instead of skirting around the edges of my abortion, I wrote it. Instead of feeling troubled by the connection between anorexia and pregnancy, I wrote into it. Instead of wondering about the privacy of other peoples’ daydreams, I started asking hundreds of people about their daydreams. Instead of feeling thwarted by the ways in which the concept of “imposter syndrome” had grown ubiquitous […]

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