Leslie Jamison Writes A Different Kind of Love Story In “Splinters”

Leslie Jamison’s new memoir Splinters follows the aftermath of divorce and the awakening of motherhood, but it explores desire more than it does any kind of death. Jamison wants to make meaning, to connect, to love, to feel, to mother, to write, and to revise her life endlessly. There are losses and grief along the way, and the entanglements of marriage and motherhood are certainly recurring ghosts that haunt the narrator’s selfhood, as it spreads and ruptures. The crystalline prose, absurdist humor, and everyday imagism that populate Splinters , however, continually draw us back to the memories and choices that make up a life, in all its messy, irresolvable variation and uncertainty. It’s not a book “about” divorce or motherhood, in other words, but about how we love and want, harm and repair, become and come undone, know and never can, endlessly. Jamison is, of course, well-established as a master of nonfiction. The Recovering is an epic treatment of addiction and healing; The Empathy Exams and Make it Scream, Make it Burn are each instant-classic essay collections. In Splinters , Jamison turns her equally practiced narrative eye on herself in her first memoir. We corresponded about avoiding the binaries of motherhood, writing into shame, and how writing Splinters transformed her. Amanda Montei : We seem to be having a moment with respect to literary and cultural representations of marriage and divorce, two subjects haunted by moralism. Men, monogamy, romance—all of these spin on an axis in the book, but ultimately, you write about resisting “the delusion of a pure feeling, or a love unpolluted by damage.” Is there something unique about nonfiction, or memoir specifically, that offers the opportunity to write away from such delusions? Your previous nonfiction draws heavily on personal experience, but this book is your first memoir. Did you always know this was the right approach to these subjects, or did you ever consider weaving research and criticism into this book? Leslie Jamison: I’m grateful to you for this phrasing, haunted by moralism , because it gives me a new way to think about the role […]

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