I really enjoyed this memoir of motherhood, covid, and the end of a relationship. I admire Jamison's work and look forward to reading more.

"I created this storm, it's only fair that I have to sit in its rain."
--Adele, Cry Your Heart Out

After reading one of her essays about her Covid experience, I was drawn to this book. Her essay and Jesmyn Ward's were two of the most terrifying essays I read early in the pandemic. This book expands on her experience as a recently divorced single mother.

Her previous work, The Empathy Exams, was a thought-provoking exploration of who deserves empathy. In this book, she turns the lens on herself, delving into a time when she believed her marriage and child would answer all her problems, only to realize that sharing her life with another was a struggle, leading to fractures in her relationship.

Very moving, powerful, and brutally honest essays that call herself out for her problems. YOu can't do any work until you acknowledge how you contribute to the situation. "no one moves through this life without causing harm..." You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause, you have to believe it is necessary."

Favorite Passages:

“I imagined someone taking a photo of our circle, with my baby bouncing there amid my students, proof of my nimble working motherhood. Perhaps if I assembled enough of this proof, it could fill whatever space inside myself I’d once imagined filling with happiness. It was as if I lived every moment of my life with the sense that it had to be good enough for someone else—perhaps my husband, to show him the life I was trying to give our daughter.”

“There is a photo of that day, actually. My daughter looks happily blurred by jumping and my students are leaning forward, listening intently, and I do look like both a mother and a teacher. But I never felt doubled. I felt more like half a mother and half a teacher, constantly reaching for each identity as if it were a dangling toy—mother, teacher, mother, teacher—until the elastic tether of the other self snapped me away again.”


“During a conversation two years earlier, when I was already unhappy enough to consider leaving, I told Harriet I was worried about the harm I would cause if I left. She told me I was right to worry. I would cause harm. She also told me no one moves through this world without causing harm. I’d wanted her to say, Don’t be crazy! You won’t cause any harm! Or at least, You’re in so much pain, you deserve to cause harm!
But she hadn’t said either of these things. What she said instead was neither condemnation nor absolution. It was just this: You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. You have to believe it’s necessary.”

“Sometimes motherhood tricked me into feeling virtuous because I was always taking care of someone. But it didn’t make me virtuous at all. It made me feral and ruthless. It steeled me to do what needed to be done.”

“We were tucked inside the logic of a fairy tale: two roads diverged in a wood. One led to a mitzvah and the other to gang rape. But I wanted to believe that the universe was an entity with benevolent intentions. That was one of the things Colleen and I shared—an instinctive, sometimes foolish faith in people; permitted by the ways in which the world had generally been kind to us. ”

“We mapped three paths: we could end things; we could radically change both our lives; or we could keep on going in this middle space, full of intensity without assurances. Each path—ending, transforming, continuing—was hard to imagine. But we liked going back and forth. I was hooked on hope and he was hooked on doom. Whenever he saw a puppy, he said, he just thought about how it would someday die.”

“Wasn’t that ultimately a more sustainable notion of love, anyway—a love that wanted to involve all your tedious moments, rather than turn away from them?”

“The ex-philosopher wasn’t my happy ending, and he wasn’t an epic punishment, either. He was just an opportunity to stand in the muck of hope and uncertainty, swiping and tapping. As it turned out, I was neither a villain nor a goddess, but just—as they say in recovery—a woman among women, a person among people. No better or worse than the rest.”

Very smart and thoughtful book about the end of a marriage and falling in love with your baby. The book is well-written, sharp, funny and honest. Appreciated the author's insights about motherhood, working and being a writer and teacher. Looking forward to her next book.

FOUR MONTHS?? FOUR MONTHS TO READ THIS?? ugh i wish i was better

thank you to little brown & company and netgalley for the digital arc!

full disclosure: i didn't have a great time with this. by no means do i think it is a bad book, but it certainly was a bad book for me.

splinters recounts a series of tumultuous events in leslie jamison's life including her marriage, the birth of her child, her divorce that soon followed, and the fallout that occurs after those events occur in such quick succession.

at her core, leslie jamison is a good writer. i'm interested in picking up her prior work because, wow, can she write a good sentence. however, i felt that splinters as a whole product was lacking in direction and vision. the fragmentary nature made it really difficult for me to dig in, and i never felt compelled to pick this up after finishing a snippet (which maybe explains why i read this over the span of four whole months...could also be a me issue though LOL).

and while i appreciated the vulnerability on display here, particularly in regards to jamison's sobriety weaved through this narrative, i actually left this feeling like she was more guarded than vulnerable. maybe this is me being greedy as a reader, and i take that as my fault and not hers as an author if that is the case, but i felt like she was skirting details that could have provided more context which ultimately left me at arm's length. i wanted her to dig in a little deeper, but no passage felt long enough to deliver the full introspection i wanted.

and just...why are we referring to the ex-husband simply as "c" or the following boyfriends as "the tumbleweed" or the "ex-philosopher?" i was annoyed LOL give them fake names!! whatever!! protect their anonymity in a way that doesn't feel so...weird? and "the tumbleweed" like...girl lmao you have to know better!!!!

anyway, i get why some people connected with this. unfortunately i am not the target audience. i enjoyed jamison's essay excerpt of this memoir that i read before i read the entire book, so maybe that format is just where i should stay.

This memoir was intimate and thoughtful. The author’s writing is keenly observant and wise. An engrossing read. A raw depiction of the complexities of desire, responsibility, and interconnectedness. Highly recommend!

What a strange book. I know so many who really responded to it, but I struggled. Sometimes Jamison falls in love with a turn of phrase at the expense of communicating clearly to her audience. In some ways, this felt similar to Kate Zambreno's The Light Room, in that it was an interior of an interior, a memoir of claustrophobic parenting very specific to NYC. But where Zambreno talks openly about class and privilege, Jamison skirts the topic entirely.

I think this one may have just hit a *littttttle* too close to home. Motherhood books are hard for me to read these days.

Leslie Jamison has real skill in developing these scenes of intimacy and matter-of-fact observation. I love her essays, less so the auto-fiction first novel, less so the memoir. I appreciate her layered look at the world.

Beautiful, moving and very funny. As with all of Jamison's work, it's insightful and carefully rendered, and despite some of the darker subject matter with the ex never felt too heavy.

Leslie Jamison is one of my very favorite contemporary authors and her latest does not disappoint. I especially love this book for its documentation and exploration of motherhood and single motherhood. Jamison’s writing is always luminous and it is bittersweet to finish a work by her.

might as well bring all my yearning ❤️ thank heavens the inimitable, brilliant Leslie Jamison brings hers!

I wanted to love this book but I felt like it was too overly literary and lacked a clear timeline so ultimately it just wasn't for me.

I Sleep in a Racing Car: Books on Divorce (or Marriage— Same Thing)

If you weren’t lucky enough to get divorced in 2023, you can always read about it.

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrot, a jazz-age divorce-lady novel first published anonymously; Milton’s tracts on divorce where he warns that marital incompatibility could lead both parties to “grind in the mill of an undelighted and servil copulation” (go off); Susan Taubes’ Divorcing, with its psychoanalysis, severed heads and Susan Sontag affiliations; Hard-to-Do by Kelli Maria Korducki, the history of breakups through a Marxist lens, read when I got married and started thinking about Marxism (fidelity to only one of these projects won out); Other Men’s Daughters by Richard Stern (Philip Roth intros it). Leslie Jamison also has a new memoir out about her divorce, and it’s probably great because no one makes a bigger show of their problems than the literary bourgeoisie. Someone I know said they hate-listened to Fates and Furies with their mother on a road trip (I trust their taste).

While divorce only plays a part in this miniature six-decade-spanning social history, The Years, Annie Ernaux finds time to write that, after her divorce, she picked up “the thread of her adolescence where she’d left it off, returning to the same kind of expectancy, the same breathless way of running to appointments in high heels, and sensitivity to love songs.” Cut to Kirk Van Houten asleep in his racing car. (The only time I ever partook in online gambling I won $175.00 on Ernaux’s Nobel win.)

My Life as Man, originally excerpted in periodical called, I kid you not, Marriage & Divorce. Other people might have more divorces under their belt (Mickey Rooney takes the cake with seven), but Roth’s endless preoccupation with score-settling—his throne was atop a geyser of outrage—makes him perhaps the most divorced man in literature. “Marriages end,” Mary Kay Wilmers said, “but divorces never do.” Never was that truer than it was for Roth. (You can Google what he’s alleged to have said after learning of his first ex-wife’s fatal car accident.)

Lastly, Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, a study of the marriages of various men and women of letters and one of the best books ever. If marriage is a tale spun by two, divorce is the two co-authors knowing to wrap things up before the story—and its players—go the way of loose, baggy Jamesian monsters. The couple that comes out looking the best, and that Rose most cherishes, is the one that never legally wed at all. Go figure.

P.S. Should you ever write a thinly fictionalized book about your divorce, be prepared for your very own former spouse to review it.

Rich, stylistic prose. This felt much more inward looking and somewhat repetitive compared to her other works, so I enjoyed it slightly less. Still, it's a pleasure to watch her mind grapple with ideas of freedom, commitment, desirability and the mundaneness of parenting. She makes even the mundane sublime.

Splinters is an interior memoir largely about early motherhood and how it affected the author's life, relationships, and writing career. Jamison does a masterful job of describing the wide emotional spectrum of early motherhood. It's all-consuming, glorious, tedious, and exhausting. As a mother, when your baby is born, your life automatically shifts quite dramatically. It can initially be quite hard to navigate and accept and it changes your relationship to your spouse irrevocably, which can be a negative or a positive thing. The birth of her daughter causes huge rifts in her marriage, and subsequently, they are in the midst of divorce proceedings when their baby is only about a year old.

The writing is descriptive and poetic, but sometimes a little repetitive. It's an incredibly interior and honest memoir, which made it a little dense to read. It kind of reminds me of the writing from a creative writing graduate course. She touches on the many conflicting thoughts she has about her daughter, her new role as mother, and navigating work and travel. How do you navigate being a good mother and maintain your career, especially while you don't have a partner to learn on? How much of our own history and baggage do we bring into parenthood? I listened to the audiobook, which is well-narrated by the author. Overall, a thoughtful memoir about early motherhood while continuing to pursue creative endeavors.

Thank you Little, Brown and Company and NetGalley for providing this ARC. All thoughts are my own.

Gorgeous, lush, moving and deeply personal. Leslie Jamison turns the pain of divorce into an exquisite jewel, a celebration of the joy of creating a new life and motherhood. I loved it.

Splinters documents those days after birth and beyond when you are consumed with caring for a new baby. I related to this so much, especially with the fixation on nursing, as well as relying on my mom as a caregiver for me! My mom, like Leslie’s was such a support. The memoir also documents the demise of her relatively new marriage to another novelist. I enjoyed the writing as it was beautiful. However, I felt like I have read this type of story before (or lived it) so it did not feel fresh or new to me. I am sure others will love it more. I wish I had read it in my 20s pre-kids.

In the aftermath of her divorce, Leslie Jamison begins rebuilding her life with her baby daughter. She examines her grief while celebrating a new life, recognizes the extraordinary within the mundane, and explores the complexities and facets of womanhood.

With The Empathy Exams, Jamison proved herself to be one of the greatest nonfiction authors writing today. Now in her first memoir, Jamison examines her own story with unflinching honesty and depth. She portrays herself as a flawed main character whose mistakes and poor choices make her relatable. She never avoids the topics that leave her vulnerable. I felt like it went on a little longer than it needed to, but I was never bored. Jamison fans and anyone who enjoys motherhood memoirs will love this.

Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

A thorough and honest excavation of the ending of a marriage and the follow through of building yourself back up after seeing your way through it.
Her writing is absolutely impeccable. I want to pick up a physical copy and highlight quite a bit.
This is my first experience with Leslie Jamison and I intend to follow her work and look back on her previous work as well.

I thought this sounded interesting and have heard a lot of praise for the author but this one wasn’t for me. Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the free ebook.