Splinters
A Memoir
Published on 22. February 2024
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-1-78378-891-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
In this blend of memoir and criticism, Leslie Jamison turns her attention to some of the most intimate relationships of her life - her consuming love for her young daughter, and a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope - and examines what it means for a woman to be many things at once: a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover.
'Splinters is as sharp and piercing as its title - a brilliant reckoning with what it means to make art, a self, a family, a life... This memoir is a masterclass' Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
In this blend of memoir and criticism, Leslie Jamison turns her attention to some of the most intimate relationships of her life - her consuming love for her young daughter, and a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope - and examines what it means for a woman to be many things at once: a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover.
'Splinters is as sharp and piercing as its title - a brilliant reckoning with what it means to make art, a self, a family, a life... This memoir is a masterclass' Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
Reviews / Votes
An exceptional read, guiding [the] reader through [Leslie's] thrilling and bitter and fulfilling affairs of the heart * Vogue * Beautifully interwoven and unputdownable... squishing layer upon layer of resonant truths into meticulously crafted paragraphs * Red * [Splinters'] pages are lit by flinty humour and grownup joy as thought and feeling are joined in prose that's intimate and exacting... never less than gripping... A mother-daughter love story that reads like a classic * Observer * An utterly absorbing account of motherhood, love and loss, in jaw-dropping sentences. Jamison transforms familiar subjects into something elemental and unique, and is one of the finest non-fiction storytellers at work in the world today. -- Sinead Gleeson Splinters is as sharp and piercing as its title - a brilliant reckoning with what it means to make art, a self, a family, a life... This memoir is a masterclass -- Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful Leslie Jamison's blazing memoir kept me riveted for the single day it took to guzzle it down. This wry, hilarious, and utterly unputdownable book is a gift that feels like an immediate hit and a forever classic -- Mary Karr, author of Lit and The Art of Memoir An astounding achievement. This is a memoir of emotional depth that reminds us that love, in its fullness, is as much a construction of jagged and flinty edges as an ideal of cloudless skies -- Esme Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias Splinters is a treatise on the contradictions of being a mother, a partner, a daughter and an artist - singly, and all at once... Jamison's love for her daughter is the crux of this book * New Statesman *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 144 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
450 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78378-891-0 (9781783788910)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Person
Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has also worked as an innkeeper in California, a schoolteacher in Nicaragua, and an office temp in Manhattan. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, as well as a novel, The Gin Closet, and the essay collection Make it Scream, Make it Burn. Her work has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.