THE SUNDAY REVIEW | SPLINTERS – LESLIE JAMISON

I was intrigued by the blurb of this book, because I’ve really been enjoying memoirs written by women who are around my age who are writing about what it means to be a mother, and further to that, what particular challenges are thrown down for mothers in this day and age. Jamison dives head-first into these deep and murky waters with no preamble. The book starts when she has left her husband and finds herself in a rented accommodation next to a fire house, sick and alone with her infant daughter. Her description of crawling after her daughter so she wasn’t out of her sight while basically being unable to do anything but lie weakly in a huddle on the floor is immediately an intense and visceral experience. From here she explores her relationship with her daughter’s father, his prior marriage, the birth of her daughter, what it was like being a new mother, and the slow to fast breakdown of her marriage. She does a good job of exploring how she felt throughout, what was going through her mind, and the doubts she was plagued with when deciding it was time to pull the plug.

She goes on to discuss motherhood – in particular what it’s like to be a working mother (and touring author) with a young baby, the pain of being separated from her child when it was her husband’s turn with her and how she felt as a teacher during that time. She shares what it was like being a recovering addict, some of the advice her therapist gave her, and her gratitude to the friends who supported her (sometimes by giving her a harsh reality check). She even discusses her dabbles into dating as a single mother. She pulls no punches when it comes to acknowledging her own ego, frailties, trauma, need for affection and addictive tendencies. None of these are ever far from the surface, it seems.

This book had all the ingredients I hoped for going in. It was honest, brutal, heartfelt and deeply revelatory. I should have loved it. And yet… I only sort of liked it. This is where I can understand the reviewers who refuse to give ratings to memoirs as they worry about judging someone’s life on the page. I could see the effort Jamison was putting into trying to be a good mother, trying to heal, to build a new life for herself, and deal with her overwhelming desire for a partner. I appreciated that she called herself out several times – for wanting approval, wanting attention, wanting freedom, wanting her daughter to behave in a certain way (even though she remembers trying to fit herself into others’ cut-out shapes for her and the damage that did). But I found the experience of actually reading this book to be difficult.

I think one of the main things I kept coming back to was that, while she’s making revelations and sharing intimate details, she walks the same ground over and over. No matter how emotional the passages, after a while I got tired of the same thing repeating. Maybe if the book had been edited down a bit, maybe if it were a little shorter and more streamlined, it would have hit me harder. I also struggled with Jamison herself. I could understand, I think, what she was sharing with the reader. I could see her patterns, where they stemmed from, why she had such trouble breaking out of them. But that didn’t make it any easier to read about some of the decisions she made that were clearly not going to end well (in particular a relationship she embarked on with a confirmed nomadic bachelor who bed-hopped his way around the world regularly). I didn’t care to witness this, even if it was her truth and even if these were experiences she needed to go through. Sometimes it seemed like she was a devoted mother who wanted nothing more than to be with the tiny person she had created. But at others it seemed like her own desires moved to the forefront in a way I had trouble understanding, let alone relating to. I don’t know, maybe this was just because of the type of experiences I’ve had as a mother, maybe it’s because of the fact that I’m not a single parent nor a working mother trying to balance so many disparate areas of my life. Maybe I’ve had the privilege of being able to focus entirely on my role as mother, and maybe that has made it seem simpler to me than it is. Maybe my own challenges narrowed my life and violently prioritized it in a way other mothers don’t typically experience. But to me, those early years of my kid’s life had a spotlight on my baby. Everything else faded into the wings, and didn’t start to come back into focus until school started. I’m not saying that’s better or more healthy, just that my own experiences were nothing like this, and I can’t even imagine wanting to start up a new relationship with a red flag guy who requires travel and long absences from my baby. So I don’t get her, I don’t really want to, and I found her repetition ended up feeling like a friend who kept dragging me away from what I was doing to comfort her over endless beverages while she whined at great length about the same. things. over. and. over. I don’t have time or patience for it, and I don’t find it particularly interesting.

I tried to read one other book by this author in the past and didn’t make it far because I found the feeling of it so difficult – a sort of self-congratulatory tone that framed basic human lessons as some kind of deep and meaningful discovery, if my memory is to be trusted (which it might not as it’s been a while since I tried it and I don’t even remember which book it was). I found it alienating and a bit boring, so I didn’t make it far. This book was better. It was a topic I care about more, it had some experiences I could connect with to a certain degree, and it was more vulnerable. It’s a book that a lot of people will probably feel a deep sense of self-recognition in, and I think it’s one that’s worth trying if you have any similar history. It won’t be for everyone, but for some it will be a wonderful discovery.

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 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 page. 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). – Goodreads

Book Title: Splinters
Author: Leslie Jamison
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook
Published By: Little, Brown and Company
Released: February 20, 2024
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Motherhood, Addiction, Relationships, Divorce
Pages: 272
Date Read: July 20-21, 2024
Rating: 5/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.87/5 (2,975 ratings)