Leslie Jamison’s New Memoir ‘Splinters’ Is Another Kind of Marital Elegy

It feels darkly ironic to be talking to Leslie Jamison about her new memoir, Splinters, on Valentine’s Day—the book is an account of Jamison’s divorce, and subsequent attempt to rebuild her life with her young daughter—but it also feels strangely right. After all, Valentine’s Day is about love, and there’s plenty of that in Splinters. There’s heartbreak, pain, COVID-related woe, and logistical fatigue, to be sure, but Jamison savors moments of light—a Wangechi Mutu artwork, a day at the greenhouse with her baby—and offers up gleaming pearls salvaged from the wreck of her marriage in a way that feels deeply generous. (One such pearl, gleaned partly through couples’ therapy: “Which is maybe how love dies—thinking you already know the answers.”)

Delving into the personal is nothing new for Jamison, whose 2018 memoir The Recovering situated her struggle with alcoholism within the larger tradition of writing about addiction, yet Splinters is her most intimate work yet, and perhaps her most resonant thus far. Vogue spoke to Jamison about drawing inspiration from Elizabeth Hardwick, writing about motherhood, and the exhilarating, exhausting work of revision.

Vogue: How does seeing this book enter the world feel, compared to the release of The Recovering?

Leslie Jamison: Well, I’ve been doing this for a while, and by “this” I mean making art that draws on my life. I can fall into the delusion that I’ll somehow become a tough-skinned veteran who doesn’t care about the bad reviews and doesn’t care what people think. And it’s bound up in a larger, lifelong delusion that I can or will become a person who doesn’t invest too much of myself in how other people think of me—but the truth is, I care. I care about how people engage with my writing, and I care what they make of it, and I care what they say about it. Anytime a book comes out, there’s a way in which a fantasy of myself as impervious or indifferent is coming up against a reality of myself as somebody who cares so fucking much, and that conflict between aspirational self and actual self is more acute to me this time around than ever before. This is the book I’ve written that matters the most to me, the book I’ve written that I’m most proud of, and also a book that is drawing from parts of my life that are so tender and so complex. So I feel like I’m a bit of an open ball of nerves, and also, I am able to put into practice some of the ways of being that I’ve cultivated over the years, like drawing boundaries in interviews and turning off my Google Alerts and making sure that I’m spending a certain number of hours each day in a separate room from my phone. All of those practices actually feel quite recovery-connected: sometimes small, concrete actions are the best way to address what feels like an impossible storm inside.