Love is a kind of re-enchantment, a magic that renders us ravenous for the most insignificant details of another person’s life. At least, this is what love is to its victims. For the rest of us, it is usually more of a bafflement. So many times, when I have finally met the person about whom a friend has been gushing giddily for months, all I can think is: Really? Him?
This is why love stories that penetrate the mystery of an infatuation are nearly impossible to write. It’s easy enough to report that a romance confers a lucency on ordinary objects, but it’s difficult to make that lucency visible to someone who remains defiantly unbesotted. How is a lover to win over a hater?
The aesthetic problems posed by love stories interest me. The moral problems, not so much. Perhaps to my detriment, I am not overly concerned with the ethics of cannibalizing one’s intimates in print, provided the writing vindicates the carnage. William Faulkner once told an interviewer, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” Certainly. Only he might have added: A writer who robs his mother had better be sure that the ensuing poetry is worthy of Keats.
Advertisement
Leslie Jamison is unafraid to pillage every last corner of her personality, but the result of her most recent ransacking, “Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story,” is not quite “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Jamison, 40, is a voracious stylist whose earlier works of nonfiction are personal but inquisitive, a lively blend of reporting and reminiscence. “The Empathy Exams,” a contemporary classic and a sort of bible for a (my) generation of ardent women, doubles as a self-examination and an investigation into, among other things, a mysterious illness afflicting hundreds and actors tasked with playing patients in medical schools. Also: alcoholism, injury and femininity.
In contrast, “Splinters” is a memoir and nothing else. It lacks the intrigue of journalism and the relief of critical digression. As Emily Dickinson wrote of pain, “It has no future — but itself.” Jamison is variously and furiously enamored — of the husband she eventually leaves, of a series of ensuing love interests — but above all she is in love with her own life and its revelation. Like most loves, this one can be hard for an interloper to fathom.
Jamison’s latest is advertised as a love story, and there is plenty of love in it. She loves her mother, her friends, a couple of quasi-boyfriends and, above all, her daughter, about whom she often writes beautifully. Many of these people love her back.
The story, however, is elusive. The book is arranged into wispy fragments — the eponymous “splinters” — of the sort that are unavoidable in so much contemporary writing. The spaces between them are the textual equivalent of a person falling into a suggestive silence and gazing off into the middle distance during a conversation. It often seems as though there is more artful elision than writing in the book.
Still, there are enough splinters to sustain a shaky narrative that runs as follows. Several years ago, Jamison married another writer, a tattooed man she refers to as C. She left him when their daughter was 13 months old because she had grown ambiently unhappy. Over the course of the next few years, she embarked on a torrid affair with a noncommittal but disastrously sexy musician, then a tepid affair with a more committal but disappointingly wooden financier. Apparently, she spent much of this time traveling to and from literary festivals and speaking engagements with her baby in tow. While she fielded questions from interviewers or delivered keynote speeches, she echoed the questions posed by Jenny Offill in “Dept. of Speculation” and Sheila Heti in “Motherhood”: Can a woman be a writer and a mother at once? Are we romanticizing or sanitizing the frequently tedious experience of child care when we focus on cute anecdotes about it? Do children alter the writing itself, perhaps slicing it up into a stranger and more fractured form?
Advertisement
Intermittently, Jamison dribbles globules of background. We learn that her mother and father divorced unhappily but clawed their way back to friendship, that she twitched through a tumultuous romance with a poet named Dave in graduate school, that she was painfully quiet in her adolescence. We learn about the stories she favored as a child and the songs she liked as a teenager, about her youthful crushes, about her alcoholism, about her friends. Some of Jamison’s many loved (and hated) ones are designated by initials or nicknames, whereas others get their full (and real) first names. The hot musician is “the tumbleweed”; the awkward financier, an erstwhile academic, is “the ex-philosopher.” A close friend is “Kyle” (presumably the writer Kyle McCarthy, who is warmly mentioned in the acknowledgments). Her mother is “my mother,” her daughter “my daughter” or “the baby.”
The inconsistency of the naming conventions is a minor irritation in a book full of major ones. “Splinters” is gruelingly and uninterruptedly autobiographical. At no point is there any interlude about the history of divorce, about divorces in film or literature, about divorce in general. “Get specific” is a maxim that Jamison repeats to her students, and one that she abides by, insofar as she appears to care only about one specific divorce. She visits museums with her daughter strapped to her chest — in fact, she does this for many pages — but even here, she is more interested in her reactions to the art than the art itself. When she sees a video installation by the Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu, she reflects, “I was embarrassed not to be enough for myself.”
She must have overcome her embarrassment eventually, because “Splinters” is a book written by a woman who is nothing if not enough for herself.
Advertisement
Despite its solipsistic streak, the book is often a delight to read. Jamison writes tactile prose, and there are luscious passages on almost every page. Falling in love is “like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth,” and a baby’s crying has “the urgency of an itch you might scratch all the way to the bone.” In the winter, the radiator thumps with “tropical panting”; when Jamison drinks too much coffee, her heart is “a hive of bees” in her chest.
The good sentences handily outnumber the bad ones, but even the good ones do not add up to much. All the little perfections of detail in “Splinters” are like dots in a pointillist painting that never resolves into a picture, and though the “love story” (or really, the myriad love stories) proceeds in fits and starts, the overall impression is one of blurry sameness. All signs point to a single meaning; everything is invested with the same drenching importance. When flying ants infest Jamison’s apartment, she wonders if “they were an elaborate metaphor for my own impulse to flee.” The picture books she reads to her daughter at bedtime “were actually about divorce.” An artist tells her about a painting in progress, and the description only makes Jamison “think of all the ways I’d turned away from C.”
When she relates some of a therapist’s insights to her friends, they reply rather dismissively, “Yep … that’s what therapy is for,” but she does not take their hints, or even her own. She often acknowledges that she is tipping into self-indulgence, as if acknowledging the tendency were sufficient inoculation against it. “I was a walking punch line,” she writes. So why does she go on walking?
Advertisement
Several times Jamison “holds” things that cannot be held, except metaphorically, and even then gingerly, among them “truths” and “the things I loved.” Initially striking words, like “grace,” soften into clichés as they are used, then abused, over and over. Too many things — the prospect of a drink for an alcoholic, a warm spa, the self reflected in the admiring eyes of a new love interest — are blandly described as “so good.”
Much of the sentimental lexicon in “Splinters” appears to be culled from therapy, and indeed, Jamison reproduces snatches of conversations she had with both her therapist and her erstwhile couples therapist on more than a few occasions. Reading the book felt wincingly akin to eavesdropping on their sessions.
I don’t mean to suggest that Jamison is wrong to incorporate the dictums of therapy into her mental repertoire, much less that she is wrong to fixate on her trials and tragedies. Her problems are real problems (even if other people have worse problems), and even a writer is not obliged to conceive of her divorce, or her years caring for a toddler alone during a pandemic, in literary terms. In other words, even memoirists are allowed to have boring experiences — and to characterize potentially interesting experiences in pedestrian language.
Advertisement
But a memoirist who publishes a book about her ordeals is obliged to conceive of them, if not in literary terms, then at least in passably public ones. A review of a piece of autobiographical writing is not a review of the associated life; it is only a review of the translation of that life into a document intended for a broader audience. Of course Jamison is entitled to brood and bluster about her uncertainties and confusions in the company of her confidantes (and in the cozy confines of her mind), but why did “Splinters” need to be a book?
The question is already an indictment. It didn’t occur to me to ask it about “Conundrum,” Jan Morris’s memoir about her gender-affirming surgery, or “The Invisible Kingdom,” Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir about her chronic illness. In “A Grief Observed,” in which C.S. Lewis takes on death — the most universal and least surprising catastrophe of all — he makes a fresh wound of it. These books are wildly presumptuous, insofar as they expect us to care about private turmoils, but they do not take our fascination for granted.
Instead, they set out to earn it. O’Rourke invites us in by reporting on chronic illness and reflecting on the more general condition of embodiment, but different sorts of invitations are possible. Lewis and Morris hew closely to their own intimate idiosyncrasies but still take care to write conversationally, if never imprecisely, so as to address their ruminations to other people.
Advertisement
What is lacking in “Splinters” is any implicit justification for the tumult of self-exposure, any entree into the forbiddingly big feelings and the breathless disclosures. Confessional writers are often faulted for sacrificing truth (and their loved ones along with it) to art, but Jamison makes the inverse mistake: She transcribes inner monologues unenhanced by any of the reshaping or revision that would make them more bearable to read. Instead of doing violence to her friends and family for the sake of the book, she does violence to the book in the interest of offering up an unedited internal reality. Such efforts are often praised as “raw” and “honest” (Jamison has been called both), but I would rather they were less honest and better seasoned. Rob the older ladies — kill them for all I care — but at least write us a good poem.
The best sentences in “Splinters” are also some of the most deflating. In the early days of motherhood, Jamison writes, “the astonishing revelations of caring for a baby felt shameful to claim as astonishing, or — honestly — as revelations at all. Attachment bathes every common thing in the glow of false remarkability.” This is the tragedy of love exactly. From the first-person perspective, there is no feeling more profound; from the third-person perspective, no attitude more ridiculous.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.
Splinters
Another Kind of Love Story
By Leslie Jamison
Little, Brown. 263 pp. $29
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK%2Bwu8qsZmtoYml8cX%2BOaWxoq6Chtq%2FAxKuqZqSVqLmqsYyjmKaho6S7br7Er6Cer18%3D