Christ Almighty this book is good. It’s a masterpiece. No one else I’ve read has captured motherhood—the painful overabundance of it, the extreme delight, the cascading fears—the way Leslie Jamison does in Splinters. No one else I’ve read has evoked so powerfully what it feels like to be pulled by too many competing tethers until you’re half a mother, half a writer, barely a wife, hardly a real person. The electric truth at the heart of this book is that, in this shattering and reassembling, you’re reorganized into a new kind of person, one attuned to abundance, open to chaos and surprise, gratified by the tiny pleasures of being alive. In Splinters, Jamison offers us an emotionally rich odyssey on the terrors and triumph of becoming whole.”—Heather Havrilesky, author of Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage and the “Ask Polly” advice column

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

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

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.