Splinters

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm.

In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled 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.

The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, 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.

How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we've caused? A memoir that plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page, full of linguistic daring and emotional acuity.