#15 – On Splinters by Leslie Jamison
A new book review
Last weekend, I read Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, the new memoir by Leslie Jamison. More accurately, I chugged it down ravenously in three sittings. (I have a thing for memoirs.)
I first encountered Leslie’s writing while reading her essay about her move to New York City in an anthology edited by Sari Botton. The immediacy, vulnerability and power of her prose kept vibrating in me long after I returned the book to the library. When I learned last year that she was releasing a memoir, I knew it had to be on my reading list for 2024. I had high expectations, and I’m indeed happy to report that it is as excellent as I hoped it would be.
The book is divided into three sections – Milk, Smoke and Fever – which are the undercurrent themes beneath the vignettes. The stories in each section are like shards of glass. They may look like they’d not fit on the surface, but you know by the end of each section how all the pieces come together to create a particular reflection of that period in her life. There is so much to say about this book, but for the sake of not making this post a three-hour read, here are three things that stood out to me:
The juxtaposition of wildly beautiful and completely ugly moments
The two main strands of the story in Splinters are Leslie’s divorce from her husband and the birth of her daughter. Divorce is such a delicate subject, but Leslie steered through the subject skillfully – she not only wrote about the pain and the ugliness of divorce, but she described it right alongside the beauty of her earlier happier years with her ex-husband. This contrasting juxtaposition provided a sharp relief of her particular experience in each moment in time and helped me, as a reader, appreciate the texture and nuance of what she was going through.
She also writes about her daughter with such tenderness that reading her words induced a literal heart-warming physical sensation in my body. For example, she says this about her daughter: “From the very beginning, there was a goodness in her. I knew it was nothing I had made.” On yet another page, she writes (referring to her daughter): “She needed to understand me as the one who would never leave.”
X-ray dissection on motherhood
Leslie is extremely honest about the realities of being a single working mom. The joy, the exhaustion, the repetition, the effervescence, the relentlessness. She lays all of it on the table.
She worries if her daughter is getting a half-mom and if her students are getting a half-teacher when her attentions are divided between the two. She wonders if sharing custody makes her less fully a mother. She adjusts to a different kind of writer life in motherhood. (“You didn’t write in the glow of your own self-immolation, but in the puddled light of a cell phone screen, or by the metronome of a breast pump.”) And she realizes the extent of her own mother’s love. (“When my mother arrived from California, I sat there on the starched sheets holding my baby, and my mother held me, and I cried uncontrollably, because I finally understood how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.”)
Throughout the book, Leslie reckons with many of her former and current selves, but her self as a mother felt especially inspiring not because she is not struggling, but because she is struggling and she is looking deeper into the truths of those struggles with introspection, curiosity and an open mind.
Homage to friendship
Although a major part of the book is Leslie’s examination of her relationships with her ex-husband and daughter, one of the most powerful parts of the book for me was the descriptions of her lifelong friendships. I could feel that there was such honesty, consistency and fierce devotion to these friendships. (“The version of myself made possible by conversations with friends was the self I most readily recognized—the self that demanded the fewest contortions.”)
And yes, a significant part of the book is about her divorce and motherhood, but the book is also about her love for her mother, love for her friends, love for life, and ultimately, love for all the people who made her the person that she is. In the end, I felt like revising the book’s sub-title just a little bit: Splinters is another kind of love story, and it is also all kinds of love stories.
PS: There were a couple of really great quotes in Splinters, but this one by G.K.Chesterton stayed with me:
“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it. You would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” – G.K.Chesterton
(I interpret the ‘self’ here as one’s ego, one’s sense of separation from the whole.)
PPS: Please feel free to let me know if anything here resonates with you. If you enjoyed reading, you can support this free newsletter by being a subscriber, liking this post and spreading the word about it. Thank you for being here! I wish you an effervescent day!
