Leslie Jamison's exceptionally astute and honest writing has been compared to that of Joan
Didion and Susan Sontag. Acclaimed for her powerful thinking deep feeling and electric prose
Jamison has never shied away from challenging material - but with Splinters she enters a new
realm. In her first memoir Jamison turns her unrivalled powers of perception on some of the
most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter a ruptured
marriage once swollen with hope and the shaping legacy of her own parents' complicated bond.
In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once - a mother an artist a
teacher a lover - Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways:
pumping breastmilk in a shared university office driving the open highway in the throes of new
love growing a tender second skin of consciousness as she watches her daughter come alive to
the world. How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope
alongside the harm we've caused? The result is an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the
muchness of life and art and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it
celebrates the arrival of another.
