Splinters

Another Kind of Love Story

By: Leslie Jamison

Narrated by: Leslie Jamison

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm.

In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways: pumping breastmilk in a shared university office, driving the open highway in the throes of new love, growing a tender second skin of consciousness as she watches her daughter come alive to the world. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.

How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last word. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).

©2024 Leslie Jamison (P)2024 Little, Brown & Company

Critic reviews

“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

“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

Felt too self indulgent - even for a memoir

Look, I’m a mother of a 2 yr old going through a divorce with her father. In many ways this book spoke to me about depths of feeling that made me feel less alone. But by the end, I felt the deadline for the draft to be done - the entire last hour and a half of this book is useless repetition of the rest of it. It feels like a story trying too hard to come to conclusions it’s not yet ready to make. There isn’t enough vulnerability or self discovery evident yet to really be affected by the work emotionally. I wouldn’t recommend unless you are literally going through a divorce with a toddler.
Tell us the rest of the story in 10 years Leslie, I want to know how you keep growing.

A wonderful and captivating story

This couldn’t have spoken to me more. The narration is nice and it’s a pleasant listen.

Excellent writing that draws you in

This book caught my attention through the very beginning. The story is written in a raw, very honest or transparent manner.

Tedious but true

Once she reviled the writing technique she tells her students, I could not unhear it in this book itself. Prepare for many college workshop similes. It’s infuriating to listen to her make so many poor judgement calls but you have to appreciate her level of candor and also my frustration probably also indicates an investment in the character, which signifies a win for the author.

Hope after divorce

Read well, but The story was too repetitive for me. Prefer more depth and growth.

Amazing

Such a gorgeously-written book about struggling with a life that is not as you planned. Jamison is the master of the perfect simile

Disappointing

I do not know I kept listening to this whole book— it simply was not for me.

Spoke my soul

How astounding to feel like a book so accurately reflects the depths of my heart, beautiful and poetic

Remarkable, powerful narrative

I have never encountered an author who can convey such powerful emotions with such simple language…its remarkable

Wanted to love it. Didn’t.

Liked her specificity. Her details. But how many times can we smell her baby’s (breath, shit, food) etc, and hear about the fire trucks next door? The tension between her guilt and pleasure felt stretched too thin by the 20th metaphor about it. I really, really wanted to like it because I imagine the effort it took to excavate such painful memories that aren’t even memories yet. And I do love her sentences, so exquisitely constructed. But, so many anecdotes felt forced and made for highlighting in one of her classes.
She often wonders of others in the book (her lover, friends, parents) “why are you telling me this” and I found myself asking the same. I’d hoped the splintering would sharpen moments and memories, instead it felt repetitive by the end. Her walking into the ocean in the dress with a lover just felt too “made for an essay.” I believe her but she’s the author you cried “this is symbolic” one too many times. For such an intimate book, I was surprised by how I felt more removed from its narrator at the end.
This seems like a book for those in certain literary/academic subset who know the backstory and all its players.