Splinters

An exceptional read, guiding [the] reader through [Leslie’s] thrilling and bitter and fulfilling affairs of the heart * Vogue *Beautifully interwoven and unputdownable… squishing layer upon layer of resonant truths into meticulously crafted paragraphs * Red *[Splinters’] pages are lit by flinty humour and grownup joy as thought and feeling are joined in prose that’s intimate and exacting… never less than gripping… A mother-daughter love story that reads like a classic * Observer *An utterly absorbing account of motherhood, love and loss, in jaw-dropping sentences. Jamison transforms familiar subjects into something elemental and unique, and is one of the finest non-fiction storytellers at work in the world today. – Sinead GleesonSplinters is as sharp and piercing as its title - a brilliant reckoning with what it means to make art, a self, a family, a life… This memoir is a masterclass – Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place BeautifulLeslie Jamison’s blazing memoir kept me riveted for the single day it took to guzzle it down. This wry, hilarious, and utterly unputdownable book is a gift that feels like an immediate hit and a forever classic – Mary Karr, author of Lit and The Art of MemoirAn astounding achievement. This is a memoir of emotional depth that reminds us that love, in its fullness, is as much a construction of jagged and flinty edges as an ideal of cloudless skies – Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected SchizophreniasSplinters is a treatise on the contradictions of being a mother, a partner, a daughter and an artist - singly, and all at once… Jamison’s love for her daughter is the crux of this book * New Statesman *

Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has also worked as an innkeeper in California, a schoolteacher in Nicaragua, and an office temp in Manhattan. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, as well as a novel, The Gin Closet, and the essay collection Make it Scream, Make it Burn. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.