Splinters

Leslie Jamison's exceptionally astute and honest writing has been compared to that of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling and electric prose, Jamison has never shied away from challenging material - but with Splinters, she enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivalled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: 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. How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss. How do we claim hope alongside the harm we've caused. The result is 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.