Splinters, Leslie Jamison
Splinters, Leslie Jamison
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Splinters
Another Kind of Love Story

Bestseller

Author: Leslie Jamison

Narrator: Leslie Jamison

Unabridged: 8 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/20/2024


Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.
 
Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm.
 
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, 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. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, 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.
 
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 and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).

Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane on February 18, 2024

Jamison writes beautifully and brings a depth of wisdom to her prose I really admire. As a memoir of motherhood and divorce there is a lot going on here. Very introspective. The parts about always trying to make yourself into what romantic interests want you to be is relatable. The overall pace and......more

Goodreads review by Shawna on January 14, 2024

This book reads like the sometimes amusing, often exhausting stories from your super toxic best friend who has no boundaries or self esteem. Some of it is interesting but most of it is riddled in red flags. Daughter obsession. Anxious avoidant attachment with men. Usually you want to leave a book fe......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on March 03, 2024

Jamison is very good at writing sentences and evoking feelings. But as a complete work there is not a lot else here. I got divorced when my youngest was about the same age as Jamison's daughter and it sent me through my own journey of dating and self-discovery so I should have been a prime reader for......more

Goodreads review by Thomas on April 30, 2024

I liked this one way more than I thought I would. It’s my favorite Leslie Jamison work since I read The Empathy Exams in 2014 way back in my undergrad years. The Recovering felt to me too much like a dissertation clumsily turned into a book, and Make It Scream, Make It Burn just seemed all over the......more

Goodreads review by Kendall on February 24, 2024

This was a slog to get through. She is an excellent writer but I strongly dislike her as a person. She gets married after 6 months and is in couples therapy after another 6 months and then thinks it’s a good idea to have a baby. Then she is surprised when that doesn’t fix anything. I also hate when......more