“Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story” by Leslie Jamison

theSkimm

Leslie Jamison was not the first woman to become separated when her child was 13 months old, but it’s rare to get such an intimate account of that messy, overwhelming, exhausting experience — especially from a writer of Jamison’s caliber. “Splinters” charts the course of her new life as a single parent, one where — as the book’s title implies — she often feels like she has one foot in multiple different lives. The one constant is her love for her daughter, making this a can’t-miss, moving look at motherhood from one of our favorite essayists. We had the chance to ask Jamison a few questions:

Q: You’re known for using hybrid forms — mixing personal narrative with journalism and cultural criticism — but “Splinters” is strictly memoir. Why the change?

Jamison: For me, every book is its own world — with its own gravity, its own rhythms, its own rules — and very early on “Splinters” told me what it wanted to be: Close to my life. Close to my days. Close to my body. I wanted it to feel intimate and close, a deep dive into emotional experience.

Every time I fell into the familiar grooves of my old ways — a riff about the fascinating history of divorce laws in America, for example, and the early days of women staying in Reno hotels while their divorces finalized in Nevada — I felt the text was almost allergic to these digressions. They felt grafted-on, as if they were taking me away from the heat of the story. This project taught me what it wanted to be, and I listened.

Q: In many ways, “Splinters” reads like a love letter to your daughter. Did writing about motherhood change your experience of it?

Jamison: Writing “Splinters” absolutely changed my relationship to motherhood: It helped me double-down on my commitment to witnessing and taking note of all the ordinary moments of our days … It also helped me think about autonomy and independence as part of our bond, rather than forces working against it. As my daughter gets older, I’m grateful for the ways we bring the world back to each other, rather than simply experiencing it as this two-headed creature made of milk and sleeplessness.

Q: What’s the best book you’ve read recently and why?

Jamison: I absolutely loved Deborah Taffa’s memoir, “Whiskey Tender,” which came out just this week. It’s a memoir about growing up Native in America — inside the incredible beauty and richness of that history, along with its pain and injustice — and a memoir about family, all the complexities of loving and being loved by imperfect but passionate human beings, and it’s just as intoxicating and intimate as its title suggests.