Leslie Jamison got married, had a child, got divorced – then wrote a book about it all

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Call Leslie Jamison a narcissist and she or he’ll shrug. “It’s a word that often gets thrown against memoirists like me,” says the New York Times bestselling writer. “The rise of the memoir is often taken as a sign of our ‘narcissistic’ times.” These days, she jokes, each unhealthy boyfriend is dismissed with the prognosis. But, sadly, so is a lady who places the intimate particulars of her private life within the public area: Jamison’s work has dived deeply into her struggles with anorexia and alcoholism. In her new memoir, Splinters, she unpacks her choice to go away her husband in 2019 when their child was simply 13 months previous.

Snatching time for a video hyperlink interview between educating lessons at Columbia University, perky, perceptive Jamison tells me she’s keenly conscious that a divorce memoir may come off as a author’s try to show her aspect of issues “into some kind of official account”. But these acquainted with the work of a lady broadly hailed because the Joan Didion of her era will know higher than to anticipate narcissistic self-justification.

Jamison, 40, is relentlessly challenged – by associates, household, strangers and her personal self-doubt – over her decisions. Her option to stroll away from a troublesome (however not violent) relationship and grow to be a single dad or mum. Her option to hold working. Her option to throw herself into a reckless new romance. And, in fact, her option to put the entire thing on the web page.

Instead of lamenting the self-absorption of Twenty first-century memoirists, Jamison thinks we should always marvel at “how interested modern readers are in the lives of others! At how we’re all looking for these points of connection, into these lines where other people have nailed down or distilled thoughts and feelings that may have been more nebulous, less understood by us until we saw them on the page.”

In different phrases, it’s sensible to be nosy. Because you’ll discover that irrespective of how bizarre or uncommon you think about your individual impulses to be, others could have felt the identical stabbing disgrace of theirs. This concept is constructed into the title of Jamison’s book, which she tells me was written in brief splintery passages designed to “feel painfully lodged under the skin”. It’s a condensed file of indignant texts, unsettling conversations and single-parent guilt. Although Jamison holds again some particulars (together with names) to guard others from turning into characters in her story, she’s frank about herself and her post-divorce craving for a romance with a singer/songwriter who, she writes, “f***ed me in ways I’ve never been f***ed before”, however had little interest in constancy or child-rearing.

This transient lover’s breezy angle to life supplied a distinction to that of Jamison’s ex-husband, the novelist Charles Bock (known as “C” in her book) whose indignant outbursts she got here to really feel looming “like a pressure drop before a storm. It was almost a relief when the rain came.”

Although Jamison describes the stress of the hypervigilance this brought on, she’s clear that Bock is an fascinating, charismatic and – in some contexts – loving man and caring father. One of the sharpest paragraphs within the book finds Jamison’s choice to go away such a man challenged by a feminine taxi driver who makes her choice to go away him sound like privilege, when so many violently abused ladies are pressured to remain. 

“One of the writing rules I try to live by is making sure other people have some of the best lines,” she tells me. “So rather than staging elaborate dramas of inner debate, I look out for moments of encounter where I can be usefully challenged or thrust up against something.”

In these moments, Jamison makes use of a private story like a canary in her tradition’s mineshaft. The late Didion used her experiences the identical means. But Jamison doesn’t relate to “the chill” she feels in Didion’s voice (honed in homage to male writers like Hemingway). Her personal tone is extra warmly and messily relatable on the web page. Google Jamison’s latest essay on daydreaming to see how rapidly you get sucked into her confessions of constructing fantasy lives with males she’s solely briefly met, and also you’ll really feel she’s like a bestie injected with reality serum.

What Didion and Jamison do have in widespread is an intuition to establish disgrace as a smoke sign for a topic that calls for consideration. “Shame,” Jamison says, “usually comes from some part of yourself that you’re trying to disown. So, what if you allow that that part of yourself is here? Ask what has it done? And what can you make of it?” 

Splinters finds Jamison – the daughter of nutritionist Joanne Leslie and economist Jean Jamison – exhuming many shames previous. She describes how her mom left her adulterous father when she was aged seven or eight, after 22 years collectively. In one tender passage she writes that she considered herself as a “‘child of divorce”, as if divorce were a parent. “When I was very young I thought divorce involved a ceremony: the couple moved backwards through the choreography of their wedding, starting at the altar; unclasping their hands, and then walking down the aisle. I once asked a friend of my parents: ‘Did you have a nice divorce?’”

After splitting from Bock, Jamison discovered herself feeling “as if I were shifting back and forth between the spectral bodies of my parents. Most of the time I was my mother, the bedrock of our baby’s life; but two nights a week I was my father, or how I’d come to imagine him, untethered, able to stay out late, or throw myself into work. It felt like cheating. It also felt good. Expansive. Intoxicating. Free.”

Having learn Jamison’s book on alcoholism, I ponder if she feels the release-shame-acceptance rush of confessional writing satiates the identical starvation. She laughs. She’s been sober since 2010 although writes of an ongoing want for the “rush of relief” alcohol gave her. She admits to sating a few of that validating reduction with “sales, clicks and likes” however laments that the fast launch of booze can’t be matched by the very sluggish technique of her work. It took her 5 years to write down this book. 

Her addictive self, she suspects, is extra prone to have migrated to on-line relationship the place she reunites with “the same part of me, that is thirsty for approval and afraid of rejection. Swiping and swiping and it’s never enough, I can become a bucket with a hole in the bottom.”

She’ll be the identical studying the press round this new book. Interviews she gave for her final book The Recovering (2018) painted such an Insta-perfect image of her post-alcohol life as a spouse and new mom. That irritated her, though she was complicit. “I deliberately chose to keep my marriage, my motherhood out of that book,” she says, “I didn’t want my sobriety tied into the old-fashioned sexism of the marriage arc.” In Splinters, she describes the stress behind a type of interviews – a new mom strapped into a designer robe, a couple already in counselling introduced as a doting preferrred.

I need to admit I googled these interviews and then spent over an hour on-line making an attempt to establish her “tumbleweed” lover. She’s not stunned. It’s an intuition she shares. In her daydreaming essay she admitted that whereas “one person might say ‘Google stalk’ and mean glancing at a Wikipedia page, to me it means getting to the bottom of the fourth page of search results, or the ninth, to the article someone’s mother once published in a neighbourhood newspaper recounting her childhood vacations to an island off the coast of Maine.”

Because I’m additionally a single mom – just lately accused of “gaslighting” my teenage children by remembering their early childhoods as happier than they had been – I ask Jamison if she worries how her daughter will reply to this account of her infancy. Jamison perks up. “Gaslighting? Oh! I’m just working on a piece about gaslighting for The New Yorker!” She’s boiled this all the way down to how we categorical our actuality with out denying that of others. But she suspects that many individuals who really feel “gaslit” could have to rethink a victimhood based mostly on “the pain of somebody else’s version of reality being different to yours”.

But she concedes that it’s probably all dad and mom gaslight their kids with seashore pictures and lovable anecdotes that conceal the layers of battle and tedium. “Yeah. I notice myself doing this,” she nods. “I catch myself wanting everything to be OK for my daughter, so I hear myself saying things are OK when she’s upset.” As a lady who spends her working days educating aspiring writers to establish the exact reality of their emotions, she is conscious it’s ironic that “I’m using my leverage to say: no, you’re not upset.” 

She hopes her daughter reads the book in the future. “Splinters is a kind of a love letter to her: a version of the first years of her life that holds a tremendous amount of love and beauty rather than a sorrowful origin story.” Jamison tells me that now her baby is in kindergarten she’s turning into conscious that she’s uncommon in shunting between households. “But I doubt that she’ll feel alone with that as she moves through school. More and more kids will experience the same.” Jamison seems to be down into her lap, amassing her disgrace and her hope.

“A friend told me something really useful, once,” she says. “I was talking to her about ‘doing harm’ and instead of saying: ‘Don’t worry, you won’t cause harm’, she said: ‘Of course you’ll cause harm. Everybody causes harm. You just have to figure out what harm you’re going to cause, why it matters and whether you can own it.’” Jamison smiles softly and takes on a tone I think about she makes use of together with her college students. “There is no perfect life where one does no damage, like pack it up backpacking leaving no trace behind. We are all leaving our detritus. We are all leaving a mess, grieving the lives we didn’t live and owning the harm we did.” She tilts her head once more. “You can live a good life anyway and that’s where I hope this book lands.” 

‘Splinters’ is revealed by Granta on 22 February