There may not be a writer alive whose self-consciousness and writerly anxieties prove more generative than Leslie Jamison’s. To read the best-selling essayist (and Columbia University writing teacher) is to experience the electricity of open nerves, to feel the thrill in how confidently she presents her own ambivalence and self-doubts, to see art made out of the turning cogs themselves. In her work—which includes The Recovering, an addiction memoir spliced with an examination of the recovery narrative, and The Empathy Exams, an interrogation of sentimentality and our assumed aversion to it—Jamison has refused pre-determined genres and forms. It’s in that refusal that Jamison’s unrivaled insight takes shape. Her gift is in telling the most complicated version of any story in the simplest, most magnetic rendering. In Splinters—which is billed as her first memoir—Jamison consistently rejects the story of herself. Written during the early days of motherhood and divorce from a man she calls C, Jamison attempts to write in a new language she is trying to work out in real-time. Where she was once a chronicler of emptiness, here, in the new days of motherhood, Jamison finds overwhelming plentitude: endless days and nights of crying; splattered and refused food; television tedium. Rather than repurposing “crisply curated moments” into memoir form, Jamison seeks the language of “maddening duration”: words that “could hold the wonder and the numbing exhaustion of the day at once.” [caption id="attachment_568288" align="alignright" width="252"] Photo: Grace Ann Leadbeater[/caption] Writing in this maternal language, Jamison is newly critical of lyricism. She punctures any instance of poetic beauty with scatology; the more gorgeous, the poopier the disruption. “I turned my back on the beautiful crooning and the desert night…and threw away the shitty diaper sandwiched between my body and hers,” goes one particularly sharp example. She is critical, too, of others’ preemptive self-awareness and the stories they like to tell about themselves. In the book’s third act, Jamison enters into a blazing romance with a keenly self-mythologizing musician she refers to only as “the Tumbleweed.” He seems to love the pornography of himself; a quasi-homeless, traveling musician who can’t help but break women’s hearts. He texts her that he can’t wait to finger her in a lake; sends her shirtless photos of himself holding a cat; says he can’t commit to monogamy. Though Splinters is her most inward-looking book, Jamison invokes a range of characters—friends, parents, exes—to both augment and challenge her own experiences. It’s a masterwork of self-interrogation, and of accepting, with clumsy grace, the irresolution of one’s own story. Below, Jezebel spoke with Jamison about her greatest work yet. Splinters implies that something was broken off from a larger piece; do you have a sense of what this large piece is? The large piece is my entire life! I mean that literally, but I also mean it in a few different senses. Every time you write personal narrative—by which I mean, every time I write personal narrative—I’m curating pieces of what I’ve lived, details and moments and memories, and sculpting them into a story. But it’s only ever a fraction of what I lived, arranged, reflected, refracted. So in that sense, the written narrative is always made of splinters broken from the whole of that infinite lived experience. Splinters announced its form to me early: these sharp, whittled shards of memory poking like needles from the bulky wholeness of what I’d lived. Eating bell peppers on a road trip with a charming musician. Signing divorce papers on a freezing Valentine's Day. Pumping in a shared office. I wanted to write these shards of memory, the ones that got…
