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.
In The Empathy Exams, the 2014 essay collection that rocketed Jamison to literary fame, that meant training her gaze on everything from the appeal of artificial sweeteners to the cliches surrounding female pain. (“I want to insist that female pain is still news,” she writes in that book. “It’s always news. We’ve never already heard it.”) In The Recovering, a work of memoir and literary criticism about healing from addiction, she writes movingly about finding something almost sacred in the ongoing tedium of recovery. And toward the end of Make It Scream, Make It Burn, her 2019 book of essays, she chronicles the daily joys of her new marriage and the birth of her daughter. “Our bliss lived in a thousand ordinary moments,” she writes.
Splinters shares this preoccupation with the sanctity of the everyday. It picks up not long after Make It Scream, Make It Burn left off, depicting early motherhood as full of both unrelenting monotony and endless fascination. But the happiness she finds with her daughter is soon marred by a complicated loss: the dissolution of her marriage. Jamison’s husband lost his first wife to cancer, and she wants to believe in her relationship as a love story with a redemptive arc. Eventually, though, her faith in that story comes crashing against the reality of co-parenting with a husband she feels increasingly estranged from. “We’d fallen from the false paradise of narrative, the idea that I might save him from his tragic loss, into the dirty nursery of our days,” she writes. The book’s structure also seems to reflect her shaky faith in narrative (another classic Jamison theme): Rather than offer a comprehensive account of those years, she’s chosen to tell the story in a series of fragmented scenes, or “splinters,” as she recently described them to me on the phone.
In our interview, Jamison delved into the difficulty of making art about motherhood, the ethics of writing about your loved ones, and how the revision process can sometimes resemble couples therapy.
You’re known for writing hybrid essays that mix personal narrative, criticism, and reportage, but Splinters is your first book that’s strictly memoir. Why did that feel like the right form for this story?
This book began as an attempt to approach a particular emotional tension: How do joy and grief live together in one phase? For me, that was obviously happening in the particular situation of falling in love with my daughter and also navigating the end of my marriage. I wanted to write into that tension, and the best way I knew how to do that was to tell a story that stayed very close to the moments of my days, where you would feel as a reader very close to my body, very much immersed in the world I was living through. It was that desire to cultivate a sense of proximity that gave rise to both the decision to ground the book in personal narrative and the finding of the form of the book. And by the form, I just mean these small pockets of prose that I think of as splinters, which is part of where this title comes from. I knew that I wanted the book to feel totally close and distilled.
Did that form present any challenges to you?
There are some projects where it feels like the best way I know how to answer a question is by coming at it from all of these different angles, bringing my life into conversation with criticism, reportage, other people’s lives. But this one felt like there was almost something Emersonian in its aspirations, by which I just mean that if you look very closely at one particular thing, you can find an infinitude in that particular thing. So I knew I wanted the gaze to be like that, almost like a magnifying glass focusing a beam of light. There are totally drafts that have pages of pages on the history of divorce in America, but when I tried to put it in this book, it was almost like the book had an allergic reaction to it. It resisted it—because the force of this book was always strongest when it stayed inside those electric moments of experience.
The hybrid essay is a form that I will never lose my love for. My next book is a book about daydreaming that’s very much personal narrative, criticism, and interviews with other people. I love that form, but I also think that I had gotten into the grooves of what it felt like to write that kind of essay, like I could feel myself hitting the familiar notes. My own relationship to it felt too much like a pair of jeans I’d been wearing every day for a long time. As an artist, you want to do something that feels different.
The difficulty of writing about motherhood comes up a couple of times in the book. At one point, you quote one of your students saying that sometimes motherhood seems impossible to write about because it’s so tedious. Elsewhere, you write that when you recorded the details of motherhood in a journal, you felt like the mother in you was at war with the critic in you—the mother in you wants to record everything; the critic wants to record lyrical details. How did you navigate that tension as you were writing the book? It seems like it has partly to do with what you were saying about form.
Part of why I think the form of the splinter, or the whittled shard of experience, felt useful for this book is that it felt like a really useful way of evoking motherhood to me: It allows you to take a few moments that can hold some of the tensions that I wanted to explore, the ways that motherhood feels sublime and profound and also kind of mind-numbingly tedious.
It reminds me of something my friend Ben [Nugent] said about writing his book Fraternity, which is a collection of short stories about frat life. He said that the inherent ugliness of the content made it more possible for him to try to be unabashedly beautiful in his language, because there was a tension in that juxtaposition. And for me there’s something about the radically distilled form and the expansive, repetitive raw material of the experience that felt like a useful pressurizing contrast.
It also felt useful formally as a way of writing into the end of marriage—where I knew that there were certain parts of the story that I was going to tell, but most of the story I wasn’t going to tell. There was something about that form that allowed me to go exactly where I wanted to go and not go to the rest of the places, without creating an experience for readers that felt withholding or coy or willfully opaque.
You write a lot about the impact that these years had on your daughter. Did you think about her reading the book when she’s older and what she might think of it?
I hope she reads the book someday. It will be her choice. What I hope it is for her is an account of the beginning of her life that holds my deep love for her, how much she changed me, and shaped me—and continues to change and shape me. And I also wanted to give her an account of the beginning of her life that held a lot of joy and beauty rather than being defined by rupture. Those are all my hopes.
But also, I’ve been writing personal narrative for more than a decade, and part of my practice is always to share work with the people who appear in it. One thing that process has taught me is that you can’t ever know what somebody will make of a piece of writing that involves them. And that’s actually part of why I do this process—rather than anticipating what might bother somebody or what they might think of it, I just try to step back and let them tell me what they make of it. Coming off of many years of sharing work with others, I just believe in the ethical stance of, “I can’t know what you’ll think about this thing.” I bring that unknowing to her someday reading of the book, but I also bring a lot of hope and a lot of love.
In this book, you’re writing about so many people who are so close to you. How much do you change or revise your work based on their feedback?
It’s different in each case. I believe in personal writing as art. It has a gravitational energy that isn’t always trumped by what somebody else wants me to do with the text. And I believe in personal narrative as not purporting to be anything more than one person’s version of the experience. I think that’s baked into the contract between reader and writer when a piece of personal writing is shared. But I also believe in giving other people a voice.
Most of the time it doesn’t feel like an antagonistic process. Probably one of the most generative versions of this process was for my book The Recovering, which also has a love story in it. My former partner read the draft twice, and he was able to offer additional layers of perspective on what certain experiences in our shared life had been like for him. The book was still ultimately my subjective account, but I was able to bring in these moments of counterpoint. I think that allows a book to be multi-vectored—a little bit like interlocking and maybe even contradictory vectors of emotional experience are colliding. That’s what life is, and if you can let a little bit of that happen on the page, it’s a form of truth that I’m interested in expressing.
There’s a line you have about couples therapy, “I went to get my narratives confirmed, and instead they were dislodged.” It seems like the experience of running things by people you write about is kind of similar to that.
Yeah, that’s a great connection. There’s nothing I believe in in this world more fully than getting your narratives dislodged. I think there’s just so much ethical value in letting other people’s accounts of reality push back against your own and complicate it. It’s happened to me in therapy, it’s happened to me in conversations, it’s happened to me in arguments. It’s happened to me even in the act of revision, in trying to come back to my own work and feeling these moments where I can sort of feel my own self-assertions as an overly rigid or calcified certainty. In the brittleness of my own language I can hear something that needs to be broken open or something that needs to be excavated underneath.
There’s an idea you come back in a lot of your work, but especially in this book, about the search for a sort of secular experience of the divine. I’m curious what keeps bringing you back to that idea.
This shows up all over the place in The Recovering, but own experience of spirituality is much less shaped by organized religion and much more shaped by recovery. In 12-step fellowship-based recovery, there’s the idea that a higher power is of your understanding. It could be God in the sky with his beard, or it could be the other people who are with you in meetings. Or it could be the rivers that Raymond Carver loved—like, every time I step in a river I feel like I’m going back to the sources of the earth. Insofar as my spirituality has been shaped by recovery, my sense of the forces of the world that might give me some sense of divine presence are pretty far away from a deity figure and are very much located in the proximate materials of the world all around me. And absolutely in art—both the art that’s meant a lot to me as a writer, but also literally experiences of being in galleries that take my breath away.
So I think a big part of the search for a kind of secular divinity in this book is also bound up in these museum moments that populate the book. There’s a moment when I talk about an exhibition of home movies at MoMA as a both “a daydream and a homecoming.” There are these experiences of art that become not only conduits to some version of a secular divine, but a way of sensitizing one’s gaze to the divinity that’s all around you. It feels like an escape from my life, but it also returns me to the streets of Brooklyn in this state of awe where I’m like, “You on the subway, you are fighting a great battle!” I think Winogrand serves that function in the book most forcefully and clearly, but it’s part of how I understand the role of all those museum moments in the book.
The last thing I’ll say about that is that it actually connects back to your very first question, because to the extent that there are moments of criticism in the book, they are very much moments of embodied, scene-based criticism. There’s not a section break and then the introduction of the critic’s voice as braiding some thread about Winogrand into a personal essay. It’s me and my daughter in the space of this gallery regarding Winogrand’s color photographs as slides on the wall, and it feels like secular church. The way the book is approaching a number of artists and artworks is a form of criticism that is deeply rooted in the granular, the particular, the visceral, the emotional, the subjective. It’s a different version of the hybridity that can be at work in a structurally different way in some of the essays.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
