Splinters by Leslie Jamison: a beautiful, raw, tender memoir of relationship breakdown and motherhood

Splinters

Author: Leslie Jamison

ISBN-13: 978-1783788910

Publisher: Granta

Guideline Price: £16.99

“We have betrayed those tender people, but we still carry them around inside of us wherever we go.” This is one of the many lines that punched me hard in the first few pages of Leslie Jamison’s Splinters. Jamison is writing about falling in love with C, and then falling out of love with him.

In essence, it is a simple story. Girls meets boy, they make a home, they make a child. Except here it isn’t as straightforward or simple as this. And they don’t live happily ever after. Not together, at least. Jamison writes about her ex-husband with grace. There is no blame assigned, not entirely, on anyone. And yet, because I remember well this feeling of not knowing whether you have left something because it just wasn’t working, or because you couldn’t make it work, at times I really wanted to look into her eyes and tell her that it wasn’t her fault.

As Jamison is going through the painful divorce process, she is also raising a baby, and going on a book tour. She tries to juggle her personas – writer, professional teacher and mother – as well as the parts of her that are grieving her marriage and trying to meet new people. Her mother is there helping her, and they become a unit again, as they were when Jamison was growing up and her father had moved away.

I find her writing about her own mother so poignant and beautiful, about the model of motherhood that she had set for her, where love is intuitive and unconditional. We all want to be taken care of without asking for it, without even knowing that we do.

Minor travel disasters and me: Ask me about how I discovered Germany had two Freiburgs

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Ben Kane: When writing about combat and injuries, it helps that I know what blades do to flesh

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Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women; Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children - listening to a wider narrative

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The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won The War by Giles Milton

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Watching her baby play the rainbow xylophone, Jamison feels the absence of the child’s father beside her acutely: “Would every moment of happiness carry this weight tucked inside of it?” Having been a single parent, bringing up my child alone in a foreign country, I remember how I longed to have someone there besides me who would feel as irrationally proud of this child. I wanted someone there besides me to stand and stare at their sleeping face too.

At times I would grow impatient, mumbling, ‘Just tell me what happens next’. But in Splinters I also found that sometimes it is important to stay in the moments, in writing as in life

Jamison’s writing on early motherhood, of watching the Winter Olympics late at night with her daughter’s milk breath against her cheek, made me miss those early days of motherhood so much. I longed for them, that yearning collapsing all the dark memories of long, sleepless nights and days with colicky babies.

As in her previous essay collections, The Empathy Exams and Make it Scream, Make it Burn, much of Jamison’s writing inhabits the spaces outside the binaries, instead fixing in the amorphous free spaces where love and tenderness coexist with incompatibility and loneliness. The book is filled with crystallised fluid pauses, of little moments when life turns one way or another. At times I would grow impatient, mumbling, ‘Just tell me what happens next’. But in Splinters, I also found that sometimes it is important to stay in the moments, in writing as in life.

[ The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath review ]

I don’t know how to review a book so beautiful that it feels painful to share it with anyone else, so tender and raw that it feels sacrilegious to treat it as a mere piece of writing, with a writer so skilful and honest that it feels as if she is only writing for me. I am fan-girling hard. This is not a term I ever use but, when applied to Splinters, I feel this term acquires a sort of elevated elegance almost by association. Maybe you can read it too and we will all join hands and run away and form a Leslie Jamison fan club.

[ Make it Scream, Make it Burn: Essays of compassion and conviction ]

I underlined so many lines, circled so many words. There are some books you just can’t put down and there are some books that you have to put down after every few pages because they devour you, they turn you inside out to reveal raw skin, all the parts you like to keep hidden, and you feel like you have been squeezed hard, hugged tightly, coiled around by your own memories that you hadn’t thought about for many years, or ever, and you have to stop and breathe.

It is about trying to reconcile all the various splintered selves, some that we know of and some that unknowingly spring up at the most unexpected times

Ultimately, it’s a coming-of-age story, of a woman who is trying to know what she wants instead of believing that she wants things that others – mostly men – want. It is also about choice and about beginning to own your choices, and about bodies – Jamison’s addiction and eating disorder, which were central to her previous book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, also run as a thread here. It is about loving and figuring out what love really means. It is about trying to reconcile all the various splintered selves, some that we know of and some that unknowingly spring up at the most unexpected times.

In the end, first and foremost, this is a love letter to her daughter, her love for her blazing through every page, unadulterated and unsullied by any self-doubts. It held the thread strong and firm, anchoring Jamison to herself. Out of all her splintered selves, this one remains whole.

Pragya Agarwal is the author of a memoir (M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Woman. Her latest book is Hysterical: Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions