Splinters

It’s a privilege to introduce you to my newest book, Splinters. I can truly say this book means more to me—feels more a part of me—than any book I’ve ever written. Splinters is about a particular season of my life that held grief and joy at once: the beginning of my daughter’s life, and the end of my marriage. Writing it was like carving scrimshaw from my own bones. I wrote it not because I wanted to make my ugliest moments beautiful, but because some part of me believed they already were. I wrote it for my daughter, as a document of her earliest days, and the rupture that shaped them. I wanted her to know the love story she came from, and the different kind of love story she made possible.

This book is for her, but it’s also for you. I mean that literally. I can’t quite imagine you—which is part of the beauty of passing this book into your hands—but I imagine this book reaching you. If your heart has ever been broken by a love that didn’t turn out how you thought it would, this book is for you. If that heartbreak ever made you feel more desperate to consume the world, this book is for you. If you’ve ever asked Google to tell you how to survive your own life, this book is for you. If you’ve ever fallen in love with the wrong person and not regretted it, or loved someone so much it felt like part of your heart had taken up residence outside your body; if you’ve ever had baby shit under your nails or spit-up in your hair, or an open highway ahead of you, or unfinished business that keeps you up at night—this book is for you. I hope you find what you need in it.

“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, New York Times bestselling author of Lit and The Liar’s Club

“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. If I were offered one guide as a writer, as a mother, as a teacher, as a human being constantly reinventing herself out of necessity, I’d want that guide to be Leslie Jamison. This memoir is a masterclass.”
 —Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“In Splinters, Jamison offers a riveting portrait of rupture that is at once a page-turner about divorce, a romance about parenthood, a mystery of self after splintering, and a promise that however many times we break or are broken, art and love will never fail to mend us.”
 —Melissa Febos, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and national bestseller Girlhood

“Leslie Jamison’s memoir, Splinters, is a stairway behind the eyes of a woman in the midst of transformation, written so brilliantly, and with such a skilled hand, that readers are likely to find themselves peacefully lost even in its darker moments. These pages are so magnetizing that I wanted to race along, but forced myself to slow down enough to savor the language. No one should be this good at writing. This gorgeous book will blow you away.”
—Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody’s Daughter

“Splinters is a stunning portrait of the intricate tapestry of human emotions. On every page, in exquisite prose, Jamison unearths moments of luminosity and grace amid pain. Giving language to fundamental experiences of love, grief, and parenthood all too often skirted past, this book is essential reading for anyone who cares about the power of language to help us find solace and recompense.” 
 —Meghan O’Rourke, New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Kingdom

“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. In Splinters, Leslie Jamison is unstinting in her assessment of marriage gained and lost, of motherhood held close, and of loving oneself in the process, all conveyed with her unsparing and attentive eye.”
—Esmé Weijun Wang, New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias

“I didn’t realize I needed someone to write this book. As it turns out, I needed Leslie Jamison to write this book. It moved me so much and hooked me so quickly. I absolutely consumed it, this book about hunger and aftermath, about pleasure and beauty and silencing and speaking up, and that new language you get to invent and learn at the same time with your child. Splinters is enormously satisfying—full of passages, images, and ideas that are, quite simply, some of my favorite things I’ve ever read.”
—Mary-Louise Parker, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Mr. You, and Emmy, Golden Globe, and Tony Award winner

“Christ Almighty this book is good. It’s a masterpiece. No one else I’ve read has captured motherhood—the painful overabundance of it, the extreme delight, the cascading fears—the way Leslie Jamison does in Splinters. No one else I’ve read has evoked so powerfully what it feels like to be pulled by too many competing tethers until you’re half a mother, half a writer, barely a wife, hardly a real person. The electric truth at the heart of this book is that, in this shattering and reassembling, you’re reorganized into a new kind of person, one attuned to abundance, open to chaos and surprise, gratified by the tiny pleasures of being alive. In Splinters, Jamison offers us an emotionally rich odyssey on the terrors and triumph of becoming whole.”
—Heather Havrilesky, author of Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage and the “Ask Polly” advice column

“Jamison’s genius—a word I use without hyperbole—is her capaciousness, how she gives us the blushing baby and the shitty diapers, the sweeping romances and their residue. We see Jamison half-whirling like Rumi in the throes of ecstatic love for a new daughter, knowing her ecstasy is real because she renders it wholly, alongside the pulverizing lonelinesses of loving deeply. Splinters is a praise song for what remains unannihilated, what has been salvaged from a time—a world—of annihilation. I find in Jamison’s work what I’ve sought my entire life: a rigorous and attentive steward for whom dailiness deepens, instead of diminishes, awe.”
—Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf

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ISBN: 9780316374880
On Sale: February 20th 2023

IndieNext Deadline: 1/4/23

Publicity Inquiries: Lena.Little@hbgusa.com
Marketing Inquiries: Danielle.Finnegan@hbgusa.com