‘Who brings a laptop with her to the hospital to give birth?’ – Leslie Jamison interrogates motherhood, ambition and divorce
- Written by Astrid Edwards, PhD Candidate, The University of Melbourne
The first words of Leslie Jamison’s memoir, which opens in the throes of new motherhood, are “the baby”. But while Splinters[1] is a homage to the bonds between women, particularly mothers and daughters, men are never far away. Her father looms large – and so, of course, does the father of her child.
When her daughter was 13 months old, American writer Jamison and her husband “C” (the writer Charles Bock) divorced. Splinters is a memoir of finding motherhood, ending a marriage and falling in lust – and it is certainly marketed this way. But it demands to be read on several levels.
Jamison is a mother, and she is a daughter, a writer and a recovering addict. She is also – and she admits this – something of a handful. Those who have read her 2018 memoir-essay collection The Recovering[2] will be familiar with Jamison’s experiences of anorexia and addiction. Here, she exposes more of her personal life.
Review: Splinters – Leslie Jamison (Granta)
Jamison writes, “as I nursed my daughter, my mother brought me endless glasses of water. Our three bodies composed a single hydraulic system.” Jamison’s mother is a presence throughout the memoir, even when she is not physically present. She has been the singular foundation of Jamison’s life, and the example of adulthood Jamison seeks to model her own adult life on.
Her memoir is also a negotiation of motherhood and work. Later, her mother accompanies her on her book tours, making it
possible for me to approximate some version of the thing I’d always admired her for doing, crafting a self that understood work and motherhood as forces that could feed rather than starve each other.
The bond with her mother cannot be separated from her relationship with her husband. Like all strong memoirists, Jamison exposes her own questionable actions. For example, after receiving long-awaited news about test results for her daughter, Jamison admits she turned to her mother – not her husband, who was in the same room – to share the news. Jamison offers this kind of behaviour as one of the many reasons the marriage failed: for months, C asked, “Why not me?”.
