Leslie Jamison will appear at several events at the Auckland Writers Festival, which runs from May 14-19, including a conversation with Noelle McCarthy on Saturday May 18; tickets here.
Divorce is hell. Its customs are just as unnavigable, unwritten – demanding a kind of mercy that eludes us at our most brokenhearted. Leslie Jamison manages to make an art of divorce in the bestselling memoir Splinters, painstakingly gathering glimpses of kindness in the rubble of a relationship, like clues of some essential goodness. The ferocity of Jamison’s attention to these details, and the disarming honesty of her prose, are proof of not just a great creative mind, but of love remaining.
Still, Jamison knows all too well that love can only get you so far. Her new New York Times bestseller examines how to make meaning of love ending. Set across the feverish early weeks with her baby daughter, she chronicles the euphoria of this bond against the grief of her marriage’s collapse. Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story shows love broken down into shimmering fragments, reassembled into thin slivers, that sting and smart.
Jamison is most often compared to Joan Didion, that other Californian essayist of diamond-cut prose and a cool-headed instinct for sentences. Jamison too can deliver the bruise of recognition and administer its anaesthetic within the space of the same sentence – for this, the New Yorker termed Jamison the master of “the controlled swoon”.
In 2024, the divorce industrial complex throws up countless self-help titles (Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle) most often designed to locate the apex of blame anywhere other than the reader. Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story makes good on her title, eschewing the confessional style of other memoirs for Jamison’s distinct brand of disarmingly funny, raw prose that gets under your fingernails. She doesn’t just ask you to watch her bleed; she makes you bleed too.
Jamison has become the toast of the literary world with her five books, but Splinters, with its probing intimacy and sharply funny portrait of love in decline, is not just swoon-worthy. Joyful, despairing and unashamed, it’s a manual for how to live after love.
Editor’s note: Jamison teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, directing the nonfiction concentration; she has been vocal in her support of student pro-Palestinian protests, and signed the Writers Against the War on Gaza statement of solidarity.
To begin with the question young Leslie once asked: “Did you have a nice divorce?” And, does such a thing exist?
Well, young Leslie did not know it at the time she asked that question, but her own parents were going to model – for her – the possibilities of what divorce might make possible: not necessarily a “nice” divorce (when has anything truly worthwhile in life ever been fully described by the word “nice”?!) but a divorce that could act as a threshold rather than an ending, the gateway to a new chapter in an ongoing relationship rather than a closed door, a shutting down, a severing.
My own divorce was something entirely. But writing this book was – among other things – an investigation of the end of marriage as more than an ending, as the beginning of something else: whatever life might come next.
There’s a Jack Gilbert poem about divorce called Failing and Flying that does the rounds on Twitter that opens with the line: “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew”.
In some ways, your book felt like an exploration of that kind of loving hope. How do you wish to reexamine the approach of divorce as a failure? And why do we have such a binary attitude towards it?
It means so much to me that you would think of Failing and Flying, because this poem felt like such a beacon for me as I wrote this book – it’s as if you could sense it burning under the surface of the prose, like one of those doomed but brightly burning stars that Gilbert mentions in the poem itself: “the stars / burning so extravagantly those nights that / anyone could tell you they would never last.”
As I was writing this book, the hardest part to get right was the evocation of my marriage – when I wrote it at first, I wrote it too fully from the perspective of someone who already knew the marriage was going to end; who saw it through the gauze of that grief. What I realised in revision – and this is one of many reasons I believe in the deep creative possibilities of revision; that it’s the place where we discover and excavate the messier and more complex stories beneath the stories we find ourselves telling – I needed to allow myself to reinhabit the perspective of the woman who was falling in love. I needed to reinhabit that loving hope, as you so beautifully call it, rather than standing apart from it, almost aloof from it.
As my friend, the brilliant memoirist Mary Karr, puts it: “You don’t write the heartbreak of divorce by writing the painful parts of divorce. You write the heartbreak of divorce by writing the love that came before.” And writing the love also allowed me to dramatise something I believe about relationships: the fact of a relationship ending doesn’t negate or dissolve all the love that it held. That love is still real. The container of a narrative can become the place where it survives, or at least gets preserved.
Which brings us back to the glorious ending of Gilbert’s poem: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
How do you describe the book to people?
I describe this book as the story of one love ending while another love began: the end of my marriage and the beginning of my daughter’s life playing out during the same two year period, grief and joy twined like a double-helix through this season of radical simultaneity.
The title, Splinters, suggests an outsized, lingering pain. Why did it sit with you?
Splinters is a way of conjuring the spirit of the book, its attention to painful memories – people, experiences, relationships, harms incurred and sustained – that not only refuse to dislodge themselves, but actually become part of the body, part of the self. A reshaping force; almost a kind of memorial. But the title is also a way of evoking the form and structure of the book: I think of this as a book built of splinters, these whittled shards of text that distil entire eras – long stretches of parenting, pain, daily living – into concentrated fragments. Almost like turning the soup of life back into a bouillon cube: intense, overwhelming, powerful.
You refer to certain incidents with a clarification that your partner has sanctioned their inclusion. Why is this important, both to obtain and then to include in the text?
When it comes to personal narrative, part of my process involves inviting the other people who appear in my story to read the manuscript in advance of publication, if they want to, and tell me their thoughts. I don’t promise veto power, and I don’t promise to defer to their memory rather than my own (I think the contract of memoir is that is has reconstructed events from the necessarily subjective perspective of its author, rather than purporting a kind of journalistic gaze) but I do promise to listen, and to edit the manuscript in response.
I offered my former partner, whom I write about in these pages, the chance to read them before the world did – to tell me his thoughts, and I did just what I promised: I listened, I made some changes. I didn’t change everything he wanted me to. But I didn’t change nothing, either. Over the years, it’s been a long-haul process, refining this method, giving people a voice but not letting their voices run roughshod over my own.
And it’s been humbling – in useful ways – to realise that the reactions I anticipate people having are rarely the reactions they actually have: it’s neither my right nor my capacity to predict what people will say. I think that’s a useful moral realisation. When we forget that people can surprise us, we forget something crucial about the limits of our own knowledge.
What do you think about, when you think about your daughter reading Splinters?
Well, I think about the kind of humility I was just talking about: that I can’t quite know what she’ll make of this book, or if she’ll even choose to read it. But I’m absolutely clear on how I hope she reads this book: I hope she reads it as a love letter to her, because it absolutely is one, and an ode to our early days together—to the ways that being her mother has changed the way I see the world, opened and sharpened and unsettled and reconfigured my perceptions, my ideas about intimacy and caregiving and freedom. It’s that knowledge that I most hope she takes from this book; that she has taught me so much; that she has been – without even knowing it fully – my teacher in so many important ways.
The post-partum world you invoke is so consuming and loving and almost excessively stimulating. How did you recall that period so vividly, and what was it like reliving it through your writing?
Sometimes people talk about the post-partum days in terms of constriction and deprivation – your world gets small and cloistered, you lose sleep and freedom – and these things are absolutely true, and worth saying. But I wanted to honour something else that felt equally true about the postpartum days: how abundant they felt, how rich with perceptions and details and sensations, how overwhelming in their density and their texture.
I always write with a close attention to the body and sensory life, but with this story I wanted to honour that overload, that sense of richness – truly exhausting richness – the milk and darkness and thirst and blood of those early days.
How close can a memoir come to representing reality?
I believe that a memoir – or at least, the kind of memoir I tried to write – is less like a photograph and more like a sculpture: not a replication of reality but a work of art crafted from the materials of lived experience, but utterly shaped and crafted.
I wanted to write sentences with strange twists, deep pivots, and arresting rhythms; I wanted to sculpt prose that felt lyric and alive; I wanted to write emotional life with something like the complexity it has in the living… but these are all goals that feel connected to art, rather than comprehensiveness.
No memoir represents everything, but its partial-ness, its construction, its sculpture, is what allows it to become art, rather than a stenographer’s transcription of experience.
The memoir feels like the sequel to recovery memoirs that we rarely see, one in which you still speak to “the great emptiness inside”. How does writing help to satisfy that emptiness, if it does so at all?
Writing won’t fill the emptiness, but it can illuminate it – the way a lantern might illuminate the contours of a cave – and I think there’s something beautiful in that capacity.
“It took me years to realise that it wasn’t her hunger that compelled me but the fact she was satisfying it,” you write in the book. How have instances like this reframed your perspective on writing, and the sort of perspectives or stories you have licence to tell?
Over the years, I’ve found myself increasingly interested in writing states of positive feeling: pleasure, joy, delight, intimacy, connection. Not as ways of sugarcoating reality, but to create a kind of chiaroscuro with the darker parts of experience: the loneliness and guilt and grief and inner aches that pockmark a life.
I’m interested in how these states of pleasure, joy, surprising grace might carry just as much complexity as the forms of pain and suffering that are often – implicitly or explicitly – granted a monopoly on profundity. So in this moment of observing a stunning art installation (Wangechi Mutu’s beautiful film, Eat Cake, that features her crouched on a riverbank above a chocolate cake, devouring it with her bare hands) I found myself transfixed not by hunger – the state of longing that had held me tightly through the years of my anorexia – but by what it might feel like to have one’s hunger, even briefly, satisfied.
Early in the book, you write: “I imagined someday telling my daughter the story of these days.” Is Splinters the story of these days?
Yes! Or rather, it is one story of those days. And this book is nothing if not an acknowledgment of the fact that every day could be told as a thousand different versions of itself – a thousand different stories.
And you write: “Instead of waiting for an impossible sense of certainty to arrive, I could conjure it myself.”
And Splinters is the story of confronting the delusion of that certainty!
I love the Paul Auster quote, “All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.” Does this feel true to you? As a memoirist, do you feel your work is a way of dividing those people inside of you, or categorising aspects of your personality in a way that feels true and more definable?
I love that quote, and it feels close to the spirit and project of Splinters, which is a book very committed to an understanding of the self as something multiple and crowded, rather than a coherent monolith: the narrator of Splinters is a version of myself I’ve built on the page, sure, but she is many things at once – bouncing from one self to another, as it were: a mother, a daughter, a wife, an ex-wife, a teacher, a friend, a lover, a woman crying on the subway, a woman drinking too much seltzer because she can’t drink anything else; a woman made of body and mind and also oversized and very wounded heart.
The project of writing this book felt less like a project of division – parcelling and naming these selves by separating them – and more like a project of bringing all these selves together into the space of the same text. Not integrating them exactly, but juxtaposing them, and insisting on all of them at once. I love this quote from Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights:
“Looking for the fossilised, for something – persons and places thick and encrusted with final shape; instead there are many, many minnows, wildly swimming, trembling, vigilant to escape the net.”
The vision of identity in Splinters is something like this: many minnows, trembling and vigilant to escape, wildly swimming; the self is at once the net that holds these fragments of selfhood together and their ferocious hunger to break free.
Now, how has the rapturous reception to the book felt, and what has touched you most about both readers’ and critics’ responses to Splinters?
I’ve been so moved by so many responses to this book – people who have told me it has already helped them survive difficult seasons, or find some vein of meaning in their life they hadn’t quite been able to articulate to themselves – but I think I’ve been most moved by the readers who have told me that this book gave them a way to find beauty in parts of their life that felt ugly to them.
My friend Joe recently said something so lovely about Splinters that gave me a way of describing some of what has been moving in peoples’ responses: “The way certain parts of the light spectrum are typically out of range for us, this book renders experience so vividly it's somehow ultraviolet — filled with colours you never knew you could see, and now that you suddenly can, you see they were there all along.”
