Leslie Jamison's new memoir Splinters examines motherhood and the end of her marriage
Leslie Jamison, author of bestsellers The Empathy Exams and The Recovering, visits Melbourne Writers Festival with her memoir Splinters. (Supplied: Allen & Unwin/Grace Ann Leadbeater)
Leslie Jamison has been reading a lot of Helen Garner lately.
The American writer and associate professor at Columbia University is writing the introduction to Garner’s three-volume collection of diaries ahead of their release in the US next year.
“I’m a huge Helen Garner fan, but I’m just reading her diaries for the first time,” says Jamison, who visits Australia next week as part of Melbourne Writers Festival.
“One of the things that I love in her diaries is these moments where she reckons with the anxiety that telling more personal or domestic stories doesn’t matter as much.”
It’s an anxiety Jamison also grapples with, as a woman writing from her personal experience — whether of heart surgery and abortion in her bestselling debut essay collection The Empathy Exams; her alcoholism and recovery in first memoir The Recovering; or the tiny moments of wonder and drudgery of being a mother to a newborn in her raw new memoir Splinters, which comes out in Australia next week.
“The same person who wrote The Children’s Bach wrote This House of Grief,” Jamison continues, citing Garner’s interior second novel about messy interpersonal relationships, and her non-fiction book about the trial of Robert Farquharson, who murdered his children by driving into a dam in 2005.
“One can pay attention to the everyday and the ordinary and find profound truth there, and also pay attention to the extraordinary or the dramatic or the newsworthy and find a great truth there. These zones of interest or insight aren’t actually in opposition.”
Jamison, who has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, similarly finds profound truth in both the everyday and the extraordinary.
She approaches her subjects — who range from fans of the “world’s loneliest whale” to people suffering from a medically disputed skin condition, to herself, her friends, lovers and family – with what feels like radical empathy. A tattoo on Jamison’s arm, written in Latin, translates to: “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.”
Kindred books
Jamison first came across Garner when a friend recommended she read the Australian author’s 1977 semi-autobiographical “grunge lit” debut novel Monkey Grip, while she was writing Splinters.
In Monkey Grip, a fictionalised Garner raises her daughter in the bohemian share houses of 70s Melbourne, at the same time as she tries to extricate herself from an increasingly destructive relationship with a heroin addict.
In Splinters, Jamison charts her early experiences of motherhood, at the same time as her marriage is ending. But it’s not only a memoir of motherhood and romantic relationships as Jamison starts dating again: It’s also a memoir about being an artist and art’s place in our lives, friendships between women, and teaching.
“I do think of it [Monkey Grip] as a kind of kindred book [to Splinters]. It’s almost like meeting a friend later in life who you feel such a strong soul communion with,” Jamison says.
The books ask similar questions, she explains: “How is one trying to be a mother and an artist? How does a work of literature try to find meaning and great profundity in many, many ordinary moments of living?
“What does the collision look like between the deep hungers for romantic partnership and love and the different kind of love that attaches itself to a child? How can romantic love hold that desire to save somebody?”
Dislodging the cocktail-party version of her divorce
In Splinters, the person Jamison realises she is not able to “save” is her then-husband and the father of her daughter, the writer Charles Bock. Bock’s first wife died in 2011, of leukaemia, an experience Bock drew upon for his second novel Alice & Oliver.
Jamison met Bock in 2014, the year she published The Empathy Exams. Six months later, the couple eloped to marry at a chapel in Las Vegas, and they had their daughter, Ione Bird, in 2018, before splitting up in 2019.
Jamison soon started taking notes for Splinters, while living in a sublet next to a fire station with her daughter.
She wasn’t interested in writing an autopsy – or the “cocktail-party version” — of the story of her marriage.
“I’m always fighting the impulse to tell a reductive version of the story that maybe leans so hard into what was hard that it forgets what was good, or leans so hard into what’s good that it forgets about what’s hard,” she says.
“I feel like the truth always lives in letting it be all the ways at once.”
Instead, Jamison wrote about falling in love with Bock; about his wit, loyalty, laugh and sharp gaze; as well as about his anger; and the distance in their relationship in the first year of their daughter’s life.
“All the ways at once” sums up Splinters: the Jamison depicted is at once a mother, an artist, a partner, an ex, a teacher, a friend, and asks how it’s possible to be all those things at the same time, even when they’re in opposition to each other.
‘Not just my own fodder’
But Jamison is not only writing about herself. Writing about other people — whether in essays that mix reportage and personal stories or in works of memoir — has forced the writer to wrestle with how she portrays other people on the page.
She usually shares her writing with the people depicted well before publication, to listen and make changes based on their feedback.
“I believe that practice is what’s right for me, and what I believe in, and how I live with what I do,” she says.
But it’s knottier when it comes to representing her own daughter, who won’t be able to have those conversations with her mother for many years.
Jamison navigated the ethical questions by only writing about her daughter up until the age of two (Ione Bird is now six years old).
“The fact that she was young, so young, made it feel less of an invasion of a sort of developed human’s life and privacy,” Jamison explains.
But she also wanted her daughter to be a very distinct character in the book.
“Before I became a parent, I hadn’t spent that much time around babies and very small children,” she says.
“I just did not understand the extent to which babies and toddlers have very distinct and actually quite fascinating personalities and subjectivities at very young ages.”
While she doesn’t rule out writing about motherhood again, Jamison plans to approach writing about her daughter in the future carefully.
“Writing about her over the remaining stretch of her childhood is something that I think I will do much more sparingly and with a great deal of respect for her privacy and for her experiences being hers and not just my own fodder,” she says.
“Perhaps some of the writing about her as a child, I’ll have to hold onto it until she and I can go through [it together] too. And I imagine I’ll probably grant her a bit more veto power than I do to some of the other folks in my life.”
Not another Didion
Jamison is part of a tradition of women writers grappling with how to be an artist and a mother at the same time.
She says she’s honoured to be likened to her influences, including Joan Didion, but is all too aware of the differences in their writing.
“I think Didion’s voice has a kind of coldness or a chill or an aloofness to it, but my voice strives for something close to the opposite,” she explains.
Jamison’s writing — especially in Splinters — can instead be compared to that of contemporaries who also apply an artist’s gaze to the experience of motherhood: from Kate Zambreno (To Write as If Already Dead) to Sheila Heti (Motherhood) and Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts).
But, like domestic life, motherhood is often dismissed as a subject for literary non-fiction.
“There’s so much of a sense of, ‘well, why do you think your life matters so much? Why do you think your trauma is so extraordinary?’ As if one has to think one’s trauma is extraordinary in order to write about one’s life,” she says.
“Just because somebody is interested in themselves doesn’t mean they’re not interested in the world.
“In my own experience, of being a human among humans, it’s often the people who are most curious about themselves who are actually also most genuinely curious about other people.”
She says that literary and experimental works exploring motherhood — like that of Jamison and her peers — are helping to change these ideas.
“To bring those traits of writing that we associate with the literary to the zone of motherhood has done a lot of work to position motherhood really where it should always have been: a zone of literary concern, just like any other aspect of experience.”
Splinters by Leslie Jamison is published by Allen & Unwin.
Melbourne Writers Festival runs from May 6–12.