A few images that have stuck with me from Leslie Jamison are things, both real and imaginary, literally getting under peoples’ skin: the fibers from her Morgellons essay in The Empathy Exams, the worm in her ankle in The Recovering. It seems fitting to me that Splinters (Little Brown, 2024), her newest memoir, stays true to the theme. While she explains the title is about fracturing, representing both the form and content of the book, I also think of the splinter more literally as a through line running in all of her work—a consequence of the inevitable frictions of life that requires close, careful examination.
This is a book about divorce. It is a book about starting over. But focusing on the “aboutness” or catalyzing drama of it all betrays the gift of Jamison’s work, which is figuring out how to live—standing at the end of a driveway of a house that has burnt down and asking, “What’s next from here?” The answer involves the repetitive acts of caretaking, load-bearing friendships, mothering and being mothered, and long walks through museums and botanical gardens. Jamison’s work has been described as “finding beauty in the mundane,” a description which I resist. To me, it makes the case that there is no such thing as the mundane. If you’re bored, you’re not looking closely enough.
Jamison and I talked via Zoom from our apartment living rooms.
***
The Rumpus: On its face, Splinters is a divorce memoir like The Recovering was an addiction memoir. I’m interested in how your approach grapples with the genre.
Jamison: I was definitely aware of and thinking a lot about the relationship that I wanted this book to have to what you describe as this central rupture, this central shattering, the divorce. It’s at the core of it, divides part one from part two. I think that it was frankly a lot more difficult for me to think about writing into or around divorce than alcoholism, addiction, or recovery. In describing what this book was about to other people after I had written it, I found myself often saying that it was a book about beauty and rupture. And at a certain point, my partner was like, “Why do you think it’s a book about rupture? It’s a book about divorce.” And I realized, in the way that our own abstractions are often poker tells, that I had much more shame about writing a book about divorce than I had ever had about writing about addiction. I never really felt shame about addiction, and so much of that has to do with everybody who came before me and the stories that had already been told. I think part of the shame came from feeling like it was a genre subject that was seen as inherently sensationalist or exploitative or violating of your own privacy or another person’s.
My response to that was twofold. One was to think quite clearly about why I had chosen the form that I had chosen. This book has a slightly different structure than anything I’ve written before, in terms of these very small unit sizes that are short searing fragments. I intuitively was drawn to that because it was a structure that allowed me to tell precisely the parts of the story that I wanted to tell and to leave everything else out. So while there is some material about what happened between me and my partner, the vast bulk of all that material is very absent from the book. My hope is that the book’s gaze is focused on exactly what felt the most emotionally important to me and hopefully compelling enough to a reader that they’re not thinking about all these things they’re not being told and that they’re invested in the part of the story that they are being told: a story about simultaneity and a story about grief and a story about building a new sense of self when you’ve had to let go of this story you thought your life was going to have or the way you thought it was going to look.
Ultimately, to me, at least, that was more interesting than, “What are the thousand things that break down between two people that make them decide they can’t be together any longer?” There are many interesting stories to tell about that, too, but any memoir isn’t telling all the stories. It’s only telling a few of them. Thinking about my relationship to the event of divorce or the genre of the divorce narrative helped me get clear with myself about what emotional storylines were most important for me to tell, and why, and what form I had chosen in order to serve those particular emotional story lines.
Rumpus: How do you think about talking and conversation as part of the writing and revision process?
Jamison: I think with Splinters, always for me the motivating impulse of the book was very clear, which had to do with these two experiences being side by side: the experience of grieving my marriage and the experience of falling in love with my daughter. All of life is simultaneity for everyone. We’re all inside of many different tracks of experience at once. But there was an acute simultaneity that was present in this intoxication of new motherhood and feelings of panic and self-recrimination and grief that surrounded the end of my marriage—the incongruity, and also force, and cognitive dissonance and heart dissonance of those things happening at once, but also the ways in which they became totally entwined with each other.
That simultaneity was always what was most compelling to me, and I think it’s why I begin the book in that firehouse sublet when you can feel those two experiences right up next to each other. That, too, is a sense that the value of writing about this has to do not just with one experience or another but a conversation between them. In that vein, conversation feels always like an important part of my writing because it’s the way that often you figure out what you want to say about a thing, by virtue of thinking about it in relation to something else, whether that’s two personal experiences that you put in relation to each other or something else. A lot of my work is interested in putting personal experience alongside other kinds of artifacts, whether that’s bits of cultural history or literary criticism or other people’s lives that I’ve gathered through reportage. So there’s a reciprocal illumination.
The last thing I’ll say about conversation is that being read by other people is a huge part of my revision process and my editorial process. I have a beloved set of friend-readers from different eras of my life who are always primary readers on my manuscripts, and I read their manuscripts as well. It’s a hugely important presence in my life and process. What they are able to see in a manuscript, how they can see lurking deep questions that I wasn’t quite able to articulate to myself or was spending four hundred pages writing around, or the ways that they can see those moments where I’m afraid to say the thing that I actually want to say—there’s a kind of X-ray vision that comes from those other readers that also feels like an important part of conversation. Ben, my book editor, has been my editor for almost a decade now, so there’s also a kind of richness and accumulation that comes from working on multiple projects with each other and trusting him because we’ve gone through so many projects in the past and trusting the way that he is able to read through the lyricism or poetry or whatever might be working in my prose even before the thinking has finally arrived. He’s always able to spot those moments and say, “You know, it feels like there’s something more here that you’re trying to say.” There are a thousand moments that come to mind from Splinters. Ben was somehow able to see the parts of my psyche that hadn’t made it into the version of the story, where the kind of bow had been tied prematurely or too neatly or too early.
Rumpus: There’s a lot of wisdom parachuted in from your friends. Harriet saying that you have to believe the harm you caused to be necessary is one that has stuck with me in the months since I first read Splinters. This book is also about life and how it’s propped up by female friendship. How did you think about that?
Jamison: Thank you for asking about friendship, because it is such an important part of this book to me. I have written about friendship before, but there are certain parts of my life and self off the page that have felt a bit more fully expressed in my writing and some that have felt less fully expressed. I’ve written so much about romantic relationships in my work, and I realized to a certain point that if somebody met me, they’d see that actually friendships are, in a way, far more important to me than romance will ever be. Not that it needs to be comparative, but they’re a huge part of who I am and who I’ve always been, and I was excited by the idea of writing into a time in my life in which I depended so heavily on friendships, because it felt also like a way of bringing that truth of my experience to the page in a way that I had never quite before. Although Harriet in particular, who’s been a good friend of mine for almost twenty years, showed up in “A Grand, Unified Theory of Female Pain.” It’s like Harriet says, “Pain that gets performed is still pain.” I’m always teasing her because so often people will be like, “That was my favorite part of this text.” I tell her, “You’re basically the star of everything I’ve ever written.” I like some of those threads between texts.
I also wanted to honor the ways in which friendship was certainly, yes, a source of emotional support when it felt like one iteration of my nuclear family was breaking apart. I sought solace not only in the bonds that existed in the nuclear family that I’d come from—in a big way, my relationship with my mother—but also the bonds of friendship as this set of intimacies that exist outside of a nuclear family and remain as a sustaining force, even when the nuclear family breaks apart. At one point, I say, once my mother left, my friends became my mother, and I wanted to honor the way a friendship bond can elastically move between lots of different kinds of bonds. You can have a kind of courtship with a friend that feels almost like the flicker charge of romance. You can feel mothered by friends while you also mother them. There’s certainly a lot of sororal energy in friendship.
But to your point about insight or wisdom parachuting in, I also wanted to document the ways that friends have not just been a source of emotional support. There’s also been, like literature and like art, the way that their minds help me make sense of experience. And that becomes a source of support, too, because it becomes part of how I not just survive my own life but understand these various fractures and sources of pain in my life as sources of meaning. For me, that feeling that what I’m going through is somehow meaningful or has some sort of illumination to offer is as important as being offered comfort. A gesture that shows up at various times for the book, like in that moment with Harriet and in a few different moments with my therapist, is that I wanted somebody to tell me something is okay, and they don’t. I want them to almost tell me that something is okay by telling me that what I fear doesn’t actually exist or won’t actually happen, but the more complicated form of solace they offer is more, “The thing you fear is true is true, but also this other thing is true.” You are going to cause harm. But also, everybody causes harm, and the relevant question is not “Am I going to cause harm?” but “Do I believe this harm is necessary?” My therapist says, “The thing you fear is true. This divorce will have an impact on your daughter. But also, it’s true that maybe the more important question is, ‘What will your response to that impact be?’ rather than ‘Does that impact exist or not?’”
Not only is this tapestry of insight coming from other people who I love an important part of this book, it’s this particular dynamic of not offering the false reassurance or making every hard thing go away, but offering what’s ultimately a more sustaining form of reassurance. It’s, “Here’s what you can do with these hard things that you’re afraid of.”
The Rumpus: Not to spoil anything, but the book ends on a note of hope in the face of the realistic doubt that the book starts with. I’m curious how you think of that relationship between hope and doubt going forward.
Jamison: It’s actually connected to what we were just talking about, this idea that the most durable forms of hope, or that the forms of hope that I’ve encountered in my life that I’m able to believe in, generally make promises that are not always like the promises that I was most attached to like when I was young. There’s one kind of promise that you’ll get a happy ending, or things will turn out well, or this marriage will last, or you’ll get the things you want professionally, or that things are even always progressing towards feeling better or being better. But I’ve been able to trust more fully what I heard this guy say in a church basement once in recovery. He said, “Things don’t always get better, but they always get different.” That revision was helpful for me because I believed it. I believe that things actually do always get different. And that felt like an actionable form of trust. Okay, I don’t have to make what might feel like a false or naive assumption that everything is going to get better. But I can believe that it’s going to change.
One of the kinds of hope that the end of this book believes in is that idea of things opening up and continuing to transform. Even narratively, the third section of the book is the section that takes place during the early months of the pandemic. There’s a radical lockdown and a claustrophobic tightening of experience. There are a lot of places this book could have ended and didn’t end, like I didn’t end with the introduction of the relationship I’m now in. I wanted to end with this moment of the world opening out again, going from the closure of lockdown to this trip down to Maryland to see two very dear friends and being in the sunlight. It was the fact that things will change and they will open that felt like a truer form of transformation to offer than the redux version of the marriage plot, or something that was like, “Well, you could always get married again, and then maybe you could have the same happy ending that you’d always been hoping for.”
The second thing I wanted to say about hope and doubt is that there’s a question that shows up very early in the book: would every moment of happiness have this grief tucked inside of it? And the book returns to that question near the end to essentially say yes, but maybe that was the wrong question to be asking. The form of hope that this book is interested in isn’t a form of hope that’s predicated on getting rid of grief. It’s a form of hope that’s predicated on figuring out what are all the ways that a life can exist alongside lots of things: alongside grief, alongside regret, alongside guilt, alongside harm. And again, there’s something you give up when you give up the fantasy that one can get rid of the past in certain ways. But there’s also, for me, a more solid footing, or a kind of footing I can trust, in the idea that happiness doesn’t actually depend on getting rid of those things.
***
Author photograph by Grace Ann Leadbeater
