Beauty in the Breakdown: On Leslie Jamison’s “Splinters”
Leslie Jamison | Splinters | Little, Brown and Company | February 2024 | 272 Pages
A woman crouches over a tiered chocolate cake in front of a tree. She wears a floor-length gown and clear platform heels. Her white acrylic nails look like talons. Her hair is matted but voluminous. She grabs chunks of the cake by the fistful, putting them in her mouth, feral and furtive.
This image comes from the artist Wangechi Mutu’s videotaped performance piece Eat Cake, which mesmerized Leslie Jamison when she first saw it at The Brooklyn Museum. “Whatever I was hungry for, I wanted to look mysterious and profound in my hunger, as this woman did, underneath a weeping willow, with cake caught under her long nails and smeared across her lips,” Jamison writes in her new memoir, Splinters. “It took me years to figure out that it wasn’t her hunger that compelled me, but the fact that she was satisfying it.”
In Splinters, a memoir that traces her marriage to a man she identifies only as C and its breakup alongside the birth of her daughter, Jamison describes her insatiable hunger, the persistent subject of her work, as “the great emptiness inside.” Jamison, who sought a divorce from her husband over irreconcilable differences when her baby was thirteen months old, defines this void as “the space I’d tried to fill with booze and sex and love and recovery and now, perhaps, with motherhood.”
The birth and growth of Jamison’s daughter and the blossoming and dissolution of her marriage unfold in short passages; beginnings and endings much more fluid than those timestamps suggest. Throughout the memoir, Jamison intersperses vignettes from her parents’ complex relationship—a twenty-two year marriage despite her father’s affairs and absences, followed by a divorce and then an amiable reconnection—and her lifelong interest in making sense of that relationship.
Splinters also explores Jamison’s voracious writing, which she describes as “Big Feelings and Big Projects”; teaching; book touring; professional ambitions; and how to grapple with success. All these fragments, interwoven in Splinters, constitute an inward project: Namely, how a creative individual mines her life to illuminate what “the great emptiness” feels like, why she feels that way, and how navigating the internal abyss interfaces with the outer world.
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Jamison crafts scenes that enable the reader to scrutinize the deep-seated sources of friction between herself and C, and how their swelling romance has belied their incompatibilities. When the endocrinologist calls Jamison to inform her that the baby does not have a congenital deficiency as they had feared, for example, Jamison pivots to share the news with her mother, rather than with C, even though he also is in the room. “For months, C brought us back to that moment: ‘Why did you turn to your mother first, to tell her our daughter would be fine? Why not me?’” C’s questions are the last lines of this anecdote. Jamison neither analyzes them nor tells us what happens after he asks them. Instead, the dynamic of the situation lingers like the tension in the room, leaving readers to ask themselves questions: Should the person to whom Jamison turned first even matter? Why isn’t relief that their daughter is fine the prevailing emotion? Why does Jamison’s mother-daughter relationship make C jealous?
When Jamison and her husband finally separate, she finds his outright nastiness and vitriol “clarifying,” compared to these nuanced, mercurial currents that existed when they were married. “At one drop-off—as I stood in the doorway of our firehouse sublet, with the baby in her stroller beside me—he called from the vestibule, ‘Why don’t you eat something, you anorexic bitch,’” she recalls. The effect of this memory isn’t simply to paint C as a bad person and Jamison as a victim. Rather, the scene shows us how two people exist with one another when something doesn’t work between them. Part of the barb’s precision comes from C’s intimate understanding of Jamison. Earlier in the memoir, Jamison references the first time she told C about her eating disorder. In that moment, he interrupts her to share “how little his [first] wife weighed by the end of her life,” as if they are perversely competing with one another.
In Splinters, we have only the juxtaposition of these scenes as Jamison recalls them. We don’t have access to a fuller picture of the drop-off, or C’s perspective—just the reality of his words: words that stem from an amorphous hurt perhaps, or words that in turn aim to hurt.
Acknowledging that no writer is a foolproof narrator, Jamison addresses her position as author: “Every story is only part of the story, of course,” she writes. The purposeful gaps and Jamison’s withholding give each anecdote its punch. And for Jamison, destruction coexists with beauty. A certain kind of glamor resides not just in possessing a void like the great emptiness—which lends the person who holds it an air of depth, impenetrability, and mystery—but in one’s reaching for destructive, impulsive, or obsessive remedies to fill that void. The lyric “there’s beauty in the breakdown” from a song by Frou Frou came to mind upon reading Splinters. This could be the slogan for Jamison’s oeuvre.
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Jamison has always had an inclination toward personal catastrophe and destabilizing experiences. Her work spans a novel (The Gin Closet, 2010), two essay collections (The Empathy Exams, 2014, and Make It Scream, Make It Burn, 2019), a book about addiction that blends memoir, literary criticism, and journalism (The Recovering, 2019), and newspaper and magazine pieces too numerous to list. Each of these texts flirts with self-destruction en route to self-fashioning. “I was always either poised at the threshold of some major change, or reeling in its aftermath,” she writes in Splinters. “Maybe every rupture offered the chance to emerge as someone else, slightly altered, on the other side of each crisis.” Jamison isn’t the only person who has lived through an addiction, dealt with an eating disorder, fallen in love, married, had a child, or went through a divorce. Her power lies in studying these moments in flux closely, like butterflies pinned under glass. When we read about her life, her words make us feel like we’re discovering truths about our own.
At one point in the memoir, Jamison instructs her students to “get specific,” a tenet that anchors whatever Jamison might be writing. You might never have visited The Brooklyn Museum or been called an “anorexic bitch” or raised a toddler, but Jamison’s sentences can transport you there. Splinters above all is an exercise in noticing, in Jamison taking in her world, and shaping what she sees for the reader. The great emptiness inside might be Jamison’s stated fixation, but the fullness outside—observations, contradictions, human nature—compels her in equal measure.