Splinters: A Memoir

(Hardback)

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Description

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

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 -- Esm Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
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

Author Bio

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.