From the
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Recovering
and
The Empathy Exams
comes “a blazing, unputdownable memoir” (Mary Karr, author of
Lit
), the “piercing, intimate” story (
TIME Magazine
) of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love. ​
Leslie Jamison is among our most beloved contemporary voices, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. In
Splinters,
Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of her most intimate relationships: new motherhood, a ruptured marriage, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once, Jamison juxtaposes the magical and the mundane in surprising ways. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, a deep reckoning that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.
How do we move forward into joy while haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the term
tour de force
seems to have been coined,
Splinters
plumbs these questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page, full of the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made
instant classics. A master of nonfiction, Jamison evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).