Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story

In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled 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, & 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. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life & art, & a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.

How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these & other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page, full of linguistic daring & emotional acuity. Jamison, a master of nonfiction, evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual & the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).

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Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams.