Splinters | Granta

  • Published: 22/02/2024
  • ISBN: 9781783788910
  • Granta Books
  • 272 pages

Splinters

Leslie Jamison

In this blend of memoir and criticism, Leslie Jamison turns her attention to some of the most intimate relationships of her life – her consuming love for her young daughter, and a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope – and examines what it means for a woman to be many things at once: a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover.

Splinters 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 Beautiful

Leslie 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 Memoir

An 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 Schizophrenias

The Author

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 NewYork Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, as well as a novel, The Gin Closet. 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.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Leslie Jamison on Granta.com

In Conversation | The Online Edition

In Conversation

Leslie Jamison & Margo Jefferson

‘The self is the work of art. Criticism puts that self in the service of other art.’

The authors discuss the multiplicity of the self, the idea of necessity, and how to work with what you lack.

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

The Day After Trump Won

Leslie Jamison

‘I feel afraid, and I do not know what to make of yesterday’s belief. I can see that belief like an object shimmering underwater, a kind of relic.’