Splinters

by Leslie Jamison (Author, Narrator)

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, here's a captivating memoir, hailed as 'unputdownable' by Mary Karr (author of Lit) and 'piercing, intimate' by TIME Magazine. It's a journey of rebuilding life post-divorce, delving into motherhood, art, and new love.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Essays, Biography Memoir, Parenting, Biography

9 pages, Audiobook

First published February 20, 2024

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jamison writes beautifully and brings a depth of wisdom to her prose I really admire. As a memoir of motherhood and divorce there is a lot going on here. Very introspective. The parts about always trying to make yourself into what romantic interests want you to be is relatable. The overall pace and balance of the book felt off. An engrossing read overall.

[Shawna Alpdemir · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reads like the sometimes amusing, often exhausting stories from your super toxic best friend who has no boundaries or self esteem. Some of it is interesting but most of it is riddled in red flags. Daughter obsession. Anxious avoidant attachment with men. Usually you want to leave a book feeling something… I’m leaving this one feeling relieved it’s over.

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jamison is very good at writing sentences and evoking feelings. But as a complete work there is not a lot else here.

I got divorced when my youngest was about the same age as Jamison's daughter and it sent me through my own journey of dating and self-discovery so I should have been a prime reader for this. Instead I couldn't really tell what the point of it all was and there were only one or two times in the entire book that I encountered emotions that I recognized and could relate to.

A lot of things that are very dramatic in real life are deeply boring when you try to write about them and divorce is generally one of those. Maybe Jamison knows this? It's not clear. At the beginning it feels like we are going to get a book about divorce, except that after moving us in this direction we then we get almost nothing else about it except as context, the situation that Jamison is in. But if it's not a book about divorce it's strange to have as many of the trappings of it that we do.

Mostly it feels like a book about motherhood, and Jamison's experience of it is intense. And it is so much of what she writes about that it is a relief when she starts dating again and instead we can watch her make terrible decisions there.

If I'd known this book would be as much about parenting an infant and toddler as it is I probably would not have read it. For a long time we had almost nothing and now we have so much. It is a needed correction generally, but writing about it is quite challenging to give shape and meaning and often Jamison struggles to do that. It's possible many readers will find feelings they recognize, see validation, etc. But that was not my experience.

I like a focused memoir, as I often write in these reviews. And this is focused. But it also isn't, the title is appropriate. It is mostly in small vignettes and it's not clear why Jamison has chosen to focus on this period. What is the change? What is the story? What is the arc that we should care about here? I never found answers to those questions.

[Kendall · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a slog to get through. She is an excellent writer but I strongly dislike her as a person. She gets married after 6 months and is in couples therapy after another 6 months and then thinks it’s a good idea to have a baby. Then she is surprised when that doesn’t fix anything. I also hate when mothers are martyrs and she is the ultimate. She doesn’t let her husband do anything to help with childcare but she complains the whole time that she’s doing it alone. Also there was no mention of the fact that her ex already had a daughter so maybe he wasn’t such an inept father and could have handled some of the responsibilities. Ugh this was a hate read. She has no perspective. Lots of people criticize memoirs that are written in real time because the author hasn’t grown from the events yet and this is definitely the case here.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this one way more than I thought I would. It’s my favorite Leslie Jamison work since I read The Empathy Exams in 2014 way back in my undergrad years. The Recovering felt to me too much like a dissertation clumsily turned into a book, and Make It Scream, Make It Burn just seemed all over the place. But with Splinters, I was hooked from the first page to the very last.

First, I found Jamison’s prose exceptionally strong in this memoir. Apart from a few dramatic flourishes, I felt the intentionality and precision behind each word. On the sentence level the book was so riveting. I don’t really care much about heterosexual marriages (or even gay marriages) or having kids, though due to the quality of her writing, I felt invested in Jamison’s divorce with her ex-husband C as well as her thoughtfully-conveyed, intense love for her daughter. Jamison shares about a couple of men she dated after her divorce and I’ll also just say that for anyone else who’s been with mediocre men before, you may find some of the content in Splinters unfortunately relatable.

I wouldn’t say this memoir felt exceptionally insightful, though it felt insightful in a quiet and still-interesting way. Jamison writes at length about topics such as her love for her daughter and how that love is intertwined at times with wanting to be left alone, as well as how not receiving her father’s consistent love has affected how she relates to men. There’s subtle yet intriguing self-analysis related to how she connects with her female friends and how many of us bend ourselves to the male gaze.

I did wish Jamison went just a bit harder in some of her analyses related to herself and broader society. She reflected a lot about the desire for a romantic partner and her role as a single parent – it just seemed incomplete to me that she didn’t at least mention broader heteronormative and amatonormative pressures that are still so present in society (e.g., wedding industrial complex, centering of romantic love in media). I feel like reaching beyond herself in these ways would’ve enhanced both the rigor and the implications of this memoir. Still, I felt entertained by it and immersed in it when I read it, so I’m overall back on the Leslie Jamison train even though her previous two books after The Empathy Exams had disappointed me.

[Bonnie G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am cutting bait on this at page 130. Jamison writes very well, beautifully really. I think this is an extraordinary accounting. She writes of how new mothering is filled with amazing things, and also those amazing things are the most quotidian things imaginable, things that are shared by most women in the world, and that is true. Jamison's account to my eye contains no new observations on becoming a parent, on the fundamental change that occurs when one becomes a mother, the realization that you don't know a thing about anything you most need to know (until you do.) She conveys well the agonies and invalidation of an unsuccessful nursing relationship. She is frank about the ways in which this all changes your romantic partnership. Look, I have been there. My son's 41-hour birth process followed by emergency c-section was traumatic for us both. After that he refused to nurse which left me feeling like an utter failure (I originally had a typo here and it said "udder failure" which was too funny not to mention) at the same moment I realized I never knew what love meant before, and I chose this perfect person to be the one I profoundly failed. I left my son's father for good the day before my son's 2nd birthday after well over a year of downward spiral where he became cruel and felt betrayed and I became completely focused on my son and too exhausted to care about his sense of betrayal. This left us both feeling useless, forlorn scaldingly sad, and baffled by where the other versions of us went. I am not saying Jamison does not capture this experience, she does so and does it well. To me though, she brings nothing new to this, no unique insight, and I can't imagine why anyone wants to just read about this or what anyone might get out of reading this. Maybe this is validating for others or enlightening. I hope it is. I know I felt very alone during this time, but I don't think this would have changed that. Perhaps it would have and I have simply forgotten what this felt like. If so I apologize. Maybe I am just reading this too late in life to appreciate it. That is entirely possible. I went with 3-stars because I think Jamison delivered the best iteration of this story but I don't understand why anyone should be reading this and I did not enjoy it at all. It didn't make me feel sad or regretful, it made me feel nothing other than puzzled.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

If Marnie wrote a book

[Carol Dawn Snyder · Rating 2 out of 5]

258 pages of whining! Yes divorce is tough and sad and lonely. This is the story of a supposedly smart privileged woman making bad choices for herself and her child. She has a streak of martyrdom in her and wants pity and applause for doing things the hard way.
She was absolutely right to leave the marriage but there are other paths and ways to be single with small children.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Midway through Leslie Jamison’s new memoir, “Splinters”, the writer takes her infant daughter to see a Garry Winogrand exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. In Winogrand’s photos, which depict patrons at the New York Aquarium and Coney Island, Jamison finds “a church of regular life,” as she calls it. “Instead of showing saints, or biblical scenes, or stations of the cross, they showed daily existence, quiet moments of loneliness, inscrutability, and pleasure.” It’s a small moment, but one that encapsulates so much of what defines Jamison’s sensibility as a writer: Like Winogrand, she’s always hungry to locate sublime moments of meaning in experiences of the ordinary.”
~~ Sophie Murguia in Mother Jones

Quiet moments of loneliness. Inscrutability. And pleasure.

How stunning is it that in the years following these endless visits in the dark warm tunnels of a photography exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum - executed in a precise choreography of steps taken while the child is finally sleeping in her stroller - Leslie Jamison would find herself gathering these same shards of loneliness, inscrutability and pleasure in her own piercing memoir about divorce and motherhood?

In a deeply reverberating text that feels very much akin to a kaleidoscope, Jamison assembles the shards of her own daily life, its loose colored pieces of glass, and weaves the tale of a self both splintered by separation and simultaneously reconstituted by the gravitational pull of mothering a child.

And what she gives us here, without always being aware of it, is the radiating, pulsing beauty that can only come from redirecting light on all the broken pieces and fragmented mirrors that make us who we are.

Just like the church-like beauty she once bathed herself in, amidst thousands of Garry Winogrand color photographs flickering in the dark, in the heart of her winter.

[Madison]

DNF at 10%

I accept that it's a personal character flaw of mine that I cannot muster up any empathy for someone who marries a deeply mediocre writer 15 years her senior, who demonstrates jealousy at her creative success from the get-go, and then is shocked when that marriage doesn't go well. Combined with the author's extremely grating audiobook delivery (somewhere between Concerned Youtuber and Slam Poet) I just can't do it.

[Laura Donovan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I was reading this book, I was also watching my two sons at an indoor play gym, constantly looking up to make sure they weren’t fighting, the little one’s diaper was dry, and the older hadn’t escaped through the emergency exit doors, which he has done in the past. They didn’t have my full attention, which Leslie Jamison beautifully suggests is “polluted attention.”

Leslie Jamison’s book embodies this struggle: the mom trying to make and appreciate art while also raising her kids to the best of her ability. It was fitting to read Leslie’s struggle to manage early motherhood and a respected writing career as if neither could impact each other. She talks of being obsessed with her daughter, her whole world, while also erasing her by forcing this little girl to coexist alongside an ambitious career. Can you have both? More importantly, can you have both when you are going at parenting alone?

SPLINTERS is about the end of Jamison’s marriage, and how she continues building her life as a single mom in the aftermath. She holds back a little in revealing what led to the end of her marriage, and for good reason. Leslie is more forthcoming in her previous memoir, THE RECOVERING, about the fraught relationship she had with her ex-boyfriend, Dave. But Leslie is more careful in SPLINTERS because there are children involved now, mainly her baby daughter, as well as her former stepdaughter, who is intentionally left out. We don’t get a ton of details on the demise of Leslie’s marriage, but her story is almost more powerful as a result. I felt the tension between her and her ex on every page. We only get a few shocking details of what went on between them, and it’s easy to imagine the rest. I trust Leslie has a good reason for omitting the million cuts that led to her divorce.

I enjoyed the parts about Leslie trying to date in the aftermath of the divorce, COVID, and beyond. I was intrigued by the rebound guy who came into her life shortly after she became a single mom, and how he represented a return to youthful infatuation for Leslie. Leslie doesn’t paint a rosy portrait of life as a single mother. There’s a lot of loneliness here, as well as a desire for a village we all desperately need. Motherhood is so physically demanding and draining, but sometimes, moms have to do it alone to give their kids their best.

Thank you Net Galley for the ARC. When it comes memoir writing, Leslie Jamison is as good as it gets. Every sentence, paragraph, and word is chosen with care and precision. She is the best we have.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) I have something kind of mean to say but I probably shouldn’t say it here

[E-Lynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly it got pretty unbearable towards the end and I was forcing myself to finish it. If you’ve ever met someone who’s been to too much therapy and feels the urge to dress up every passing thought in layers upon layers of psychological analysis — reading Splinters is is like being trapped in an endless monologue with them. But at the core of it, the fears and desires she described were so intensely… child-like. I don’t like to leave a memoir with judgment but it was sort of astounding to me how a grown woman could be still haunted by so much insecurity and need for emotional validation and see nothing but her own self-image in every work of art she describes.

A lot of the book also felt like a defensive justification of becoming a mother and getting divorced. Frankly, reading someone describe the made up words that her child is saying and the way she’s banging her toys against the table, is about as interesting as a stranger showing you their baby’s photos completely unwarranted. She wants it to be artistic fodder but it’s the complete opposite. I’m sorry but you cannot make a toddler’s behavior interesting and I don’t care to read endless descriptions of it.

The other thing that drove me crazy was how she clearly preempts certain critiques and drops some token sentence to refute it, but not in a satisfying or meaningful way. E.g. complaining about some motherhood-related problem (I forget what; they were all so banal) and then quickly acknowledging she still has it better than most as a privileged white woman. Or conceding that a parent’s attachment to their child makes them lose perspective on what’s actually remarkable — and then later proceeding to list all the nonsense words their child has ever said (yes it’s cute to you but nobody else…)

I kept thinking as I read this that this is exactly the book that Hannah Horvath would have written once she had her baby and that is not a compliment. I am really sad at how much I hated this book because I loved The Empathy Exams so much but I have resolved to never read another Leslie Jamison book about her own life again.

[Cookie Dou · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir felt a bit self indulgent for me, although as I’m writing this I’m wondering if that’s just what a memoir is. I love Leslie’s essays about everything ranging from reincarnation to a lonely whale but reading this memoir about her divorce and motherhood felt like reading a toxic best friend’s diary. I kept wanting to shake her and tell her sis this is not the way: the child obsession, the anxious avoidant attachment to her relationships, the blaming her father and brothers for her obsession with male validation (we don’t want to hear your excuses leslie! You know these men are trash!), the narcissism + self hatred. And yet she seems to know this, as she’s probably one of the most self aware narrators I’ve read. If only she could follow to her own mantras!

I’m waiting for her to release another series of essays. This one went down fast but didn’t leave me with anything particularly meaningful to hold onto. :/

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jamison is, at the sentence level, a very good writer! But in the end, this memoir felt like it was written by an author who had a book deal and needed to produce something, so she went for a break up + new baby double album. I didn't understand why I was reading it, it felt like getting access to the (again, very well written) diary entries instead of the book itself. As others have indicated, I do fear that some of this has to do with her personality - her anxiety, drive, and stressful relationship habits provided helpful context for The Recovering, one of my favorite reads of the last few years, but outside of that, I think I'll appreciate more fiction and less memoir from her.

[mossflowers · Rating 2 out of 5]

pretty brave to be the villain of your own memoir, but I don't think she's doing it deliberately enough to deserve credit.

I didn't write about it at the time, but I remember loving her addiction/recovery memoir, and I liked her essay collections, but this one landed with a wet thud for me.

The inescapable structural problem here is that she -clearly in deference to her ex or at his request- has edited the entire story of their marriage and divorce to avoid mentioning his daughter from his first marriage, who she lived with and stepparented from maybe as early as that kid remembers through probably all of elementary school. while that sounds like a responsible or respectful thing to do, it leaves us with a surface reading in which he looks bad, and subtext in which she looks awful, and a synthesis where it's hard to engage with this supposedly very personal and intimate and exposed narrative as being truthful in a way that's at all meaningful.

She admits (without seeming sorry) to having shut him out of her postpartum private world with their baby while still sort of blaming him for being insufficiently involved/necessary. Which is pretty unlikable of her even in the pocket universe of the story as she tells it; but when the reader tries to mentally add the OTHER KID IN THEIR HOUSE back into the story the options she leaves are that either he was as marginal as she implies and she was primary parenting this kid she eventually bailed on, or he was doing a hell of a lot of parenting and had been for years and years and her possessiveness of the baby and reluctance to include him isn't just weird but totally perverse and unfounded. (in one instance when they're separating and she's grudgingly letting him bathe their baby in preparation for having to let him parent sometimes she white-knuckles her way through listening to him give a bath as if he's a big himbo off the street who's never held an infant, but bitch, he was the one bathing his first kid while his first wife was dying a decade ago? you've written publicly about your nerves about figuring out how to stepparent this kid who's being excellently single-fathered when you meet her dad? why exactly are you acting like he's a hamfisted idiot getting in your way????) (at other points she describes how they come to inhabit separate spheres of the apartment, her in the rocking chair with baby attended by her mother, him in a different room. But. Girl!! between the lines it seems like he was probably holding together the rest of life for the other child in your family? not just sulking in the other room while your mom brought you snacks while you nursed?)

There's a lot in here about how her dad abandoned her when her parents divorced, which leaves a whole unspoken shadow about this kid for whom she WAS THE ONLY MOTHER SHE COULD REMEMBER who just absolutely evaporates out of the narrative of her life as soon as she has her own baby, and it's definitely not because she has a moral objection to writing about kids who can't consent: her last essay collection uses that kid's first name and talks directly and specifically about her. Weird and ironic and darkly funny that that essay was about fairy tales and evil stepmothers and trying not to be one, because "she married my dad and loved me until she had her own baby and then she rewrote our life and home without me in it as if the only people in our apartment were her and my dad and my little sister and sometimes her own mother, and then she left and bitterly begrudged the two nights a week my baby sister was allowed to come over" is about as evil-stepmother as stories get without going full fairy tale.

Sure, she's respecting her ex's boundary about his kid, but she's writing a book about a desperate and ferocious dive into motherhood without acknowledging the kid who used to call her mommy (as described in her own previous book)? talking about parenting as if she's never experienced any shade of it before? It feels at best disingenuous and closer to deranged to leave her feelings about gaining and losing a stepdaughter out of her story about having a child and losing a husband.

Bottom line, if she couldn't include that part of the truth, I don't think she should have told this story; have some inside thoughts and leave this era of your life to dissect publicly from a farther remove or never; put it in your journal to cook and see if you have a memoir in 20 years.

It is an interesting portrait of a possessive and consuming kind of motherhood (she is absolutely shamelessly withholding this baby from its dad, he could use this in court as evidence for a more equitable custody arrangement). At one point one of her friends is being a little distant and she pushes to find out why and the friend admits that she needs a break from Jamison's constant whiplashing series of high drama life events, which hit hard. reading this is very much like getting another long email from your friend who simply can't get off the carnival ride of her own relational drama. She should be single for 10 years min.

very faint praise, beats You Could Make This Place Beautiful in the category of 'myopic divorce and single motherhood memoir that should have stayed in your patient friends' text history and not been published until you've marinated several more years'

[Lisa]

DNF @ 50%

If you like constant rambling about couples counseling and breastfeeding, you’ll love this.

[Terra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like other reviewers have eloquently opined: Jamison is a beautiful writer but it felt like she was too close to the experience to be able to say more than just a recount of her feelings and what happened, which is valid but not the book I was interested in reading. I’m a mother of a young child who, like many, was fully rocked by creating a new being and figuring out my way in this new world. I’ve done much soul searching to be able to zoom out and it felt like maybe she’s not there yet. (No shade, it took me years to feel like I even barely knew myself again). Like her account of single parenting with Covid. There was no grounding of her experience with others’ realities happening at the same time. While I am sympathetic, her experience was not unique. Some acknowledgement of a broader picture would have helped it not feel like a “poor me” story. A connection to the world at a time while so many were isolated in various ways (largely depending on how public facing a person’s job was).

Also, I found it troubling and sad that she often did not appear to be able to recognize what appeared to me as unacceptable treatment. I deeply recoiled at the account where the ex-philosopher said something to the effect of “I’m unsatisfied by our conversations and think they could be improved from the 85% satisfaction level” and her internal response was “how can I improve?” instead of “I hope the door hits you on the way out.” I’m no stranger to bad decisions and people pleasing, but I have worked and struggled to notice and figure out why I do these kinds of things and try to unwind the behaviors. It has become important to me to try to see the forest for the trees as often as I can, which seemed absent in the book. I wanted to scream “you don’t exist as an object for other people!! This is not a thing that kind people interested in seeing and knowing you as a unique and flawed being or interested in reciprocal connection, however imperfect it can be as complex humans figure each other and themselves out, say or even think. If he doesn’t enjoy talking with someone, maybe he should figure out his own role in the unsatisfying conversations and try something on his end or if he tried that already, just recognize it’s just not going to work INSTEAD of automatically expecting without question the other person to meet his ultimate preferences. Maybe there was some neurodivergence at play but it is not known or not clear from the writing and whoa, what a low-key villain thing to say and expect, which I guess she does say is how he self describes himself.

This may be just a me thing, but I found the repeat mentions of certain things odd (bone broth stuck out) and it made me wonder if maybe I’m not the target audience despite seeming so. Like were repeat bone broth mentions supposed to convey something to me? Fine as a passing mention that she consumed some but it almost was like she wanted it to say something about her as a person. It made me question whether this was geared for relatively well off white women who subscribe to superficial wellness as a lifestyle and spiritual identity without any of the deeper and messier work. It was super subtle but it seemed to have a “go to the spa” to solve your relationship and parenting problems vibe. That is just not the message I’m here for.

[Taylor Clarke]

Leslie Jamison has really, really bad taste in men

[Kristin Martini · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to call it at 73% and DNF. I have really admired Leslie Jamison’s writing in the past, but I think this should have stayed between her and her therapist.

She seems like the most exhausting, toxic, self-absorbed friend you can imagine. At every point she makes the wrong choice, and then seems surprised when things go wrong. She and her ex marry after 6 months of dating, start therapy 6 months after that, and as their relationship is falling apart they decide to have a baby. What could go wrong?? I want to be clear: I don’t mind people making bad decisions. I certainly have! But please, for the love of god, OWN your mistakes. Take accountability!

She writes herself as this martyr, putting her life on hold for her toddler daughter. At the same time, she’s dragging her mother across the country to babysit while she’s on book tours, she refuses to let her ex-husband take the lead on any childcare decisions/help, and she starts a relationship with a musician who tells her over and over again that he does not want a child. Then she gets annoyed at her daughter for crying in front of her FWB because if her daughter is perfect, maybe this man who has been SO clear about his desires will want to be a stepdad. GIRL grow up!!!!

She should have written this in her diary, locked it, and throw the key away.

Two stars because on the sentence level, she’s a great writer. This book just wasn’t it.

[Cyndy Allen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Couldn’t finish it. I tried. I didn’t get it. Having a baby … marriage breaking up … Yada, yada, yada. So many of us have been through it all. Nothing earthshaking happened to her. I don’t get it.

[Jessica Dekker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a hard time answering the question “what’s your favorite book?” - it seems impossible to me, but now, 30 pages away from finishing this book, Splinters by Leslie Jamison, I know I can definitively say this is my favorite nonfiction book. I’ve underlined almost every page, I’ve read passages out loud to my four month old daughter, I’ve reread lines over and over, I’ve carried it with me everywhere I go, and I don’t want it to end.

It’s Jamison’s memoir, about the grief that came at the end of her marriage, about her intense love for her newborn daughter, about how as a woman you splinter yourself and try to be so many things to so many different people.

Jamison’s prose is so evocative that I often have to remind myself I’m not reading a novel.

In my eyes, as a mother to two young girls, this memoir is perfect to me. Absolutely perfect.

Thank you so much @littlebrown for this ARC.

[Jaclyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

It kills me to write this as I love Jamison and she can write some of the most breathtaking sentences, but this was just exhausting. Divorce memoirs are tricky to get right and although Jamison exposes her role and toxic patterns that played out in her marriage, I just wanted this book to end. It was tedious and frustrating. The only shining light for me was the way she wrote about her all-consuming love for her daughter (who is going to have quite the childhood memoir to write herself someday I suspect). The tedium of this book was particularly surprising after I saw Jamison speak at MWF but I realise now she was well rehearsed with the best anecdotes at the ready. I understand this armoured preparedness but I thought we were getting at something real and raw.

[Anastasiia Mozghova · Rating 5 out of 5]

i couldn't stop reading. i had to go on! someone, please, give Leslie a hand and a hug. she deserves it!!

[cass krug · Rating 5 out of 5]

this just ticked all the boxes of what i love in a book - marriage, mother-daughter relationships from both perspectives, writing and art, grappling with the self, and starting over. leslie jamison is exploring the dissolution of her marriage to a fellow writer, being a single parent to her daughter and balancing that with her work - teaching, writing, book tours and speaking engagements that she needs to travel for, taking her daughter along for the journey. she was lucky to have assistance from her mom on these trips, but it really does make you wonder how she was able to manage.

leslie reflects on her parent’s relationship, especially after their divorce, when they developed an unconventional friendship - leslie’s mother even officiated her father’s subsequent wedding. this is very much in contrast with leslie and her ex after they split up and are not on speaking terms with each other. leslie and her mother were incredibly close after her father left, and you can see how leslie is almost projecting that closeness onto her relationship with her own daughter. she wants them to have the same relationship that she has with her mother, and her mother’s presence in the home after the birth of her daughter results in this triptych of maternal bonding that ultimately pushes leslie’s husband away. (how many times can i use the words “mother” and “daughter” in this review?)

i do think that she was really fair to her ex-husband in this book - you can see that she's grappling with feeling guilty about the hurt that she caused him, she's not blaming him for everything. she’s trying to reconcile her share of the blame with the reasons why she needed to leave the relationship, but she doesn’t disparage him when discussing those reasons.

i saw a review that was a bit frustrated with leslie getting back on the dating scene and falling into some of the unhealthy patterns that clouded her past relationships, but i think that's just life for you. i understand wanting to see growth and see her do better, but people trip up sometimes, they don’t suddenly become perfect people with perfect relationships. even though it’s a journey of ups and downs, she does make an effort to break out of her behavioral patterns and not repeat the same mistakes.

if you’re interested in this book but not ready to take the plunge, i would check out her new yorker essay. it is basically this book distilled into an essay, and if you enjoy it, you will love the book!

reading wrap up!

[Erica]

DNF at 40%. This felt incredibly self-indulgent and nothing more than a vehicle for beautifully crafted sentences. The prose is gorgeous but what is the point of this memoir? What is the reader gleaning from this book that makes it worth the investment of their time?

Splinters is a story of a privileged, successful woman discovering that motherhood and marriage are hard and you can’t have it all (at least not all at once). This is well-worn territory and I didn’t feel that Splinters added anything new or valuable to the conversation that made reading the rest of the book worth my time. There are a few beautiful and incisive passages that really capture the feeling of being in the throes of early motherhood and the strain it places on you and on a marriage, but that’s not enough to keep me invested.

I think where the book really lost me was in its failure to acknowledge the author’s privilege and how the mom guilt she suffered was in no small part due to buying into a privileged vision of motherhood and falling short. The book is comprised of three chapters, the first being entitled Milk, and the multiple stories the author tells regarding breastfeeding and pumping are sort of emblematic of this. She talks of breastfeeding as a sacred experience but also as an immense burden. There are multiple stories of her rushing across distances to nurse her hungry baby, and pumping at inconvenient places and times, and leaving her baby with others and not providing enough bags of breastmilk to see her through the day. But, like, formula is a thing? She mentions twice in this first chapter that she had not introduced formula yet but we never get the story of when she did introduce formula or an acknowledgment that exclusively breastfeeding was a choice and that there were other options available to her. Ultimately, I felt like the stories told across this chapter depicted a woman who suffered under the pressures of exclusive breastfeeding with no acknowledgment in hindsight that it didn’t have to be this way.

[Els · Rating 5 out of 5]

Splinters. Door Leslie Jamison.

Wow. Na een week in het Jamison-universum te hebben vertoefd kom ik stilletjes aan boven water. Wat een schrijver, wat een boek.

Splinters gaat voor 90 procent over moeder zijn (ik ben bewust kindvrij) en 5 procent over dochter zijn (daar ben ik niet zo goed in) én toch raakte en boeide dit boek me enorm.

Ik wou het lezen omdat de ondertitel me aansprak: een ander soort liefdesverhaal. En ook omdat een paar van mijn favoriete vrouwelijke auteurs Jamison’s naam al hadden laten vallen. En wow, wat ben ik blij dat ik het boek een kans heb gegeven en ben beginnen lezen! Gelezen is niet het juiste woord: ik heb het geabsorbeerd als een spons. Vandaar dat ik over minder dan 300 pagina’s een week heb gedaan; zuigen gaat trager dan lezen.

Splinters is als een roggeverdommeke van een goede bakker: donker, stevig, vast, vullend en boordevol rozijnen. Die rozijnen bestaan uit magisch mooie zinnen, wijze inzichten, ontroerende beschrijvingen van haar dochter maar ook van teervlekken in een rivier, verwijzingen naar andere geweldige vrouwen,…

Heel vaak dwaalde mijn geest af: bij een beschrijving van een sculptuur naar mijn eigen herinneringen aan een werk van Louise Bourgeois, maar soms triggerde Jamison ook dingen in mij die minder voor de hand lagen. Door haar bekeek ik bijvoorbeeld mijn eigen lockdown-beleving van een aantal jaar geleden plots door een andere bril.

Dit boek is zo rijk, zo gevuld dat alles wat ik hier schrijf het niet genoeg eer aandoet. Dit is één van de boeken die iets in mij hebben verschoven/open gemaakt en doen kantelen.Net zoals Maggie Nelson dat kan. Ik wil nu in sneltreinvaart alles van Jamison gaan lezen. Giga fan van haar geworden! En verliefd op Splinters, en dat voor een niet-moeder en amper-dochter. ;)

[Katie Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m having a hard time rating this book—there were parts that I really loved (the theme of beauty/art in the everyday) and parts that were so hard to get through. She’s a recovering addict and so much of her story reminds me of my brother: addicted to falling in and out of love, CONSTANTLY on the cusp of recreating yourself, and just all around making terrible choices. It’s hard to read scenarios that I went through with my brother.

She has beautiful language and prose and I love how she talks about motherhood and loving her daughter—that was all so real to me. But then sometimes I was like “girly…stop taking yourself so seriously.” So it was beautiful and it was cringey. Pace was a bit off for me.

When she writes about one of her oldest friends pulling away because her life was always so dramatic and just a lot I thought “yeah…I can see that.”

[Gabrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

People are constantly saying that Leslie could write a book about turpentine and that everyone would love it and they would. Not of this world. I just don’t like when she writes about kissing. Her last sentences sound like timpanis and French snares. She is especial XD

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

To say that Leslie Jamison one of the most prolific writers I can think of would be an understatement. She writes about tough topics- addiction, alcoholism, eating disorders, divorce- in ways that make the reader read certain passages twice, provoking more thought.

Her latest is a memoir of the end of her marriage, her pregnancy, the ensuing separation and divorce from her husband (whom she identifies as "C"), and raising her daughter as a single mom.

Interspersed are vignettes from her childhood, experiences with her parents which she feels led to her adult traits.

She writes for and from her life. Writing about her feelings of love and then falling out of love with C, she explores what leads us to being in love and what being in love does for us. Writing about her struggles and joys of single parenthood, she details her conflicts and ecstasys of daily minutia bringing a deep wisdom and desire to learn- about her daughter and herself, and the effect her sober life has on her relationships.

There is depth to each feeling explored, each paragraph.

Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the eARC.