Her most inward book ... The meaning is found precisely where it repeats something practically any adult person will recognize: a fear of what is happening within their own intimacies ... There is little cruelty in her finished work, though that’s not to say there is no pain; I winced hard at some of her recollections of how her marriage ended ... Splinters is that other love story, the one in love with our dedication to yet another kind of love, and another, and another.
We live in a golden age of autobiographical women’s writing ... As if the urgency of motherhood has retired the need for those inflecting techniques, she tells her tale straightforwardly ... Her true subject has stayed intact: the tormented ambiguity of all action, ethical and aesthetic and personal, and the consequent divisions of the self ... For a long time, 'woman writer' was an epithet in literary culture. Jamison and her peers are something much subtler: writers investigating womanhood as a category in the world, a way of being perceived, a set of challenges and fears.
This one is slimmer, less digressive, more focused on Jamison’s singular experience [than The Recovering]. But it, like its predecessor, makes a particular life ramify more broadly in intriguing and poignant ways ... About the bewildering nature of new motherhood, the implosion of Jamison’s marriage, parenting solo, dating as a single mother, coping with illness and lockdown. But it is also about storytelling ... Though this well of grief and guilt is not dramatized, it is not unglimpsed. Jamison writes around the hole in her story, and we can feel the gravity of its pull in her presentation of herself ... Her ferocious honesty, her stringent refusal to sugarcoat, her insistence on inhabiting and depicting moments in all their evanescence and incandescence make her one of the most compelling and trustworthy memoirists we have.
There is a circularity to Splinters; over and over again, in different variations of her signature, beautifully frank language, Jamison writes about her fantasy of stability and her uncertainty as to whether it's a dream she actually wants fulfilled ... Doesn't provide a unifying revelation, and even though it's relatively linear, Jamison doesn't end up in a place that's so different from where she started out. This can be easy to overlook, as she's a master at closing nearly every paragraph with what lands as an epiphany ... A beautiful tribute to the continued failure as well as the worthy ongoing attempt.
Jamison weaves a story of marital friction and motherly love that is as much about the world as it is a reflection on the self ... I couldn’t help but think that the class dimension of Jamison’s story needed to be explained.
Jamison is unafraid to pillage every last corner of her personality ... A memoir and nothing else. It lacks the intrigue of journalism and the relief of critical digression ... The story...is elusive. The book is arranged into wispy fragments ... The inconsistency of the naming conventions is a minor irritation in a book full of major ones. Splinters is gruelingly and uninterruptedly autobiographical ... Despite its solipsistic streak, the book is often a delight to read. Jamison writes tactile prose, and there are luscious passages on almost every page ... The good sentences handily outnumber the bad ones, but even the good ones do not add up to much. All the little perfections of detail in Splinters are like dots in a pointillist painting that never resolves into a picture.
Jamison's essays...are so compassionate and insightful that she interests you in topics you may not think you care about and shows you new ways to view topics you already do care about it ... Jamison is hilarious, with a dry and usually self-deprecating wit in which the jokes are so graceful and surprising that you may need to read them twice ... I was less dazzled by Jamison's writing about her painful relationships with men.
In a book so distinctly about mothering, it is even more affecting to read of Jamison’s relationship with her mother – which anchors her but brings other tensions ... Her parents’ 'improbable closeness' is something at which people often marvel. But she has come to admire their 'shared ability to hold contradictory feelings'. Leslie Jamison’s bold, thematically contrapuntal writing does just that too.
Jamison’s prose pulls you in and propels you. She is a master of making you want to keep reading. Yet, the repetitive language in Splinters, which I assume is supposed to echo the repetitiveness of looking after a baby, soon became cloying ... The book is a nervy, almost electrified, diary and confessional of the domestic. Where Jamison writes against herself, she creates a fertile space that alternates between solipsism and self-interrogation. If you are looking for a literary memoir probing the depths of childbirth, love, marriage, divorce and the systems in place that make it difficult for women – especially mothers – to thrive, this may not be the one. But, if you want to hear how these issues are navigated by Leslie Jamison, then you will be hooked.
The purposeful gaps and Jamison’s withholding give each anecdote its punch. And for Jamison, destruction coexists with beauty. A certain kind of glamor resides not just in possessing a void like the great emptiness—which lends the person who holds it an air of depth, impenetrability, and mystery—but in one’s reaching for destructive, impulsive, or obsessive remedies to fill that void ... The great emptiness inside might be Jamison’s stated fixation, but the fullness outside—observations, contradictions, human nature—compels her in equal measure.
Alongside the insights, there is a lot of beautifully expressed handwringing ... . Jamison is often funny about her situation, but after 200 pages we can sympathize with the friend who tells Jamison that she’s exhausting – always in the middle of some psychodrama.
Such is Jamison’s deftness at scene-sketching that an entire universe of botched reciprocity can be glimpsed in that moment, and the kernel of every disenchantment to follow ... Even if it’s an elegant hit job, Jamison is such a sheepishly charming persona on the page: Despite her shrewd observational acuity, she’s in a perpetual state of self-bafflement ... Jamison has a genius for quirky lyricism, for stretching the emotional lexicon into unexpected configurations.
The memoir is hindered by a custody agreement and Jamison’s awareness that her ex—and, someday, her daughter—will almost certainly read it ... For all its pleasures, and its renunciation of relationships with men, Splinters is an almost shockingly heteronormative book ... Money is the book’s biggest taboo, a topic Jamison is clearly uncomfortable broaching ... Missed opportunities to engage with often illogical variances in literary fortune, or even just plain old fortune, can make Splinters feel less substantial than it wants to be.
Interspersed throughout are Jamison’s descriptions of the everyday life of a new mother, written with a linguistic agility that veers into distractingly flowery language ... What really makes these chronicles of a new mother tolerable is Jamison’s dalliance with her post-C love interest, a musician. Jamison’s depictions of him break up the banality of the mother narrative ... Monotonous.
A refreshingly ambitious memoir ... Jamison writes about her deepest longings in a way that makes us acutely feel our own. This is memoir at its best ... Anyone facing a pivotal life change, or who is struggling to parse through the aftermath of one, can benefit from reading this memoir.
I find her writing about her own mother so poignant and beautiful, about the model of motherhood that she had set for her, where love is intuitive and unconditional. We all want to be taken care of without asking for it, without even knowing that we do ... much of Jamison’s writing inhabits the spaces outside the binaries, instead fixing in the amorphous free spaces where love and tenderness coexist with incompatibility and loneliness. The book is filled with crystallised fluid pauses, of little moments when life turns one way or another. At times I would grow impatient, mumbling, ‘Just tell me what happens next’. But in Splinters, I also found that sometimes it is important to stay in the moments, in writing as in life ... I don’t know how to review a book so beautiful that it feels painful to share it with anyone else, so tender and raw that it feels sacrilegious to treat it as a mere piece of writing, with a writer so skillful and honest that it feels as if she is only writing for me.
'Get specific,' Jamison tells her students, so often that she eventually has the maxim iced on a cake for them to better take it in. Yet in Splinters, each thought is so gilded with specific detail that her sentences plummet under the weight of the metal ... most successful when the writing asks what it means to bring up a child with someone you no longer love, whom you no longer even see ... But what Jamison most wants to do in Splinters is alchemize banality into profundity...It would have made Splinters a better book had Jamison aimed for normality: the miraculous normality of falling in love and that love coming to an end, the miraculous normality of raising a child and seeing who they become.
Jamison is a ravenous observer and a writer of razor-sharp precision and pinwheeling creativity ... A necessary work for Jamison and her readers; hopefully she’ll widen her scope in the next.
Jamison’s descriptions of life with a newborn are spot-on, conveying the glory and tedium of new parenthood, as are her descriptions of the patched together life of a working parent and writer ... Still, there is a hole in this story when it comes to the details of the rupture between Jamison and her ex-husband. Of course, these are not episodes that any reader has the right to know, but when the narrative refers to 'the unforgivable thing she did' and offers anecdotes about her ex’s continuing fury after they’ve separated, the reader is left wanting to know what happened. That said, Splinters’ close look at early parenthood, baby love, the uncertainties of relationships and how feelings of inadequacy play out in one woman’s life, rendered in Jamison’s elegant, vivid and often sensuous prose, makes her latest work stand out.
A candid, insightful, whirlwind journey as she gives birth to her daughter and concurrently ends her marriage ... A literary memoir filled with humor, which alone is worth reading the book. This title offers insight and a look into the messy, magical drudgery of life, along with the beauty of art, love, and sex that often carry people through.
