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Leslie Jamison’s Empathy Exams came to me nestled amidst a pile of Little Debbie’s Fudge Rounds—gifts my friends had chosen to soothe the pain of my recent miscarriage. I had no expectations of Jamison when I left my first chocolate smudges on the covers of her debut essay collection. My lack of preparation made the intensity of Jamison’s curiosity and the singularity of her thinking even more awe-inspiring.
Six years later, I watched my small daughter from where I lay on the floor of our New York City apartment. It was spring 2020, and we hadn’t been outside for days. I was coughing and aching and doom-scrolling flat on my back when I discovered Jamison’s essay in The New York Review of Books about pandemic parenting while sick. If she was able to find meaning and beauty in this mess, I thought, then so could I. I scrolled back up to the start of the essay to begin again.
A few months later, pregnant with my second child, I stumbled on Jamison’s essay on pregnancy in The Atlantic. Once more, the freshness of Jamison’s perspective exploded across the page like fireworks, illuminating dark corners of my own life with great big flashes of insight trailed by sizzle that lingered. The specificity of her voice, the way she merges the unexpected— these elements of her craft ignited something, setting fire to a small pile of material inside me that roared up into a manuscript.
I learned about Jamison’s most recent book, Splinters, when its sale to Hachette was first announced. Jamison on motherhood? YES. That was something worth hunting down. I trekked across the city, hurtling beneath multiple burroughs to another author’s launch for the express purpose of meeting Leslie to ask about Splinters and how soon I’d be able to read it.
Jamison’s most novel-esque nonfiction did not disappoint. It is a delicious book—as sweet and compelling as Little Debbie’s Fudge Rounds, and a brave book—one that bucks traditional narratives about mothers, women, and the oft-assumed conflict between parenthood and art-making. It is also a thoughtful book, ridged and grooved by Jamison’s signature devotion to uncovering deeper and deeper layers of truth. Most importantly, it is a book that showed me how to better understand my life (and not just because Jamison and I both lived and mothered on the same firehouse block in Park Slope), Splinters showed me how to look at my experience as a parent with a kinder, more nuanced gaze. It captures the splitting of motherhood, the many conflicting pieces that make up our selves and worlds, and it shows—with love and humor— how we can learn to let all those pieces coexist in a single whole.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
In Splinters you ask whether parenting is “the new sobriety”— a constraint that can be generative. You write about time constraints and the idea that as a parent, “solitude is now something I have to plead or pay for.” How have parenting-induced constraints on your solitude affected the structure of your writing?
Leslie Jamison
Over the past decade of my life, across different transformations—certainly parenting is the most acute and powerful of them—I’ve noticed I’m less precious about what conditions are not just necessary, but conducive to my work. All these ideas I had about myself as a writer: that my best writing would happen in long, unbroken chunks of time that began upon waking—sure, yes. They still feel like ideal writing conditions. Put me in a cottage by a lake, yes, please! But so much of my writing happens under very different conditions. It could happen during a nap. It could happen waiting for an airplane. It could happen on a Sunday night because that was the time that I wasn’t with my kid in a given week. I think part of the writing process is just grabbing the time when it’s there and showing up for the work and seeing what happens. It can even feel a little bit experimental to write in these secret, stolen pockets of time.
I feel like there’s an effect—maybe the Germans already have a word for it— if I need to leave the house at 2:10 to pick up my daughter at 2:30 that means the work happening between 1:35 and 2:10 is sometimes so much more energetic and alive. It has a frantic feeling of ‘oh my God, this is the end. What can I do before the end?’
My creative life is also energized by a desire to do something with every moment that I’m not with my daughter. There’s the sense that you have to make the time worth it. It’s like the parenting version of that line from Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, like everybody would be a good person if they had a gun to their head every moment of their life. Sometimes not being with my kid can feel like a creative gun to my head.
The last thing I’ll say is I write more directly onto my computer than I used to, in part because of time constraints. I used to think that that would compromise my prose, but I’ve actually found sometimes my prose is better. It’s more of whatever voice exists in Splinters—a little bit sharper, a little bit tighter. My sentences are a little bit shorter. There’s less superfluous, repetitive, abstract lyricism. It just has a different music to it. It feels like I discovered that version of my voice as a function of time constraint.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
Splinters felt more fun to me than your previous work. Even when things are dire, Splinters has xylophone music. You write about lizards named Taco, about real and metaphorical motorcycles, about children pouring pita chips down the neckholes of rainbow llama pajamas. It’s hilarious and joyful.
Leslie Jamison
Thank you for that evocation of joy as one of its core textures, not only because it feels accurate to me, but because it was important to me to write the joy—not sugarcoating anything, but being truthful. I wanted to write about the ways in which writing and motherhood and attention and making and wanting to make and feeling bewildered and awestruck by other subjectivities in the world are mutually deepening.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
I’m interested in that idea of motherhood as a place where we are encountering other subjectivities in a unique way. I’ve read several books recently that approach parenthood content with non-traditional text structures. One writer I spoke to said that her book’s form needed to have space for multiple perspectives because motherhood had made her aware that her story was not the only story. But I wonder why parenthood would make us more aware of other subjectivities. We’re actually encountering other subjectivities all the time, in any relationship. So why do you think that parenthood teaches us more about it than our other relationships do?
Leslie Jamison
I love that question, and it’s not one that I’ve been asked. In parenting, one gets to witness—and also terrifyingly and thrillingly influence—the emergence and formation of a subjectivity. In a sense that’s true in all relationships, whenever we come to each other, a human being is always in flux. A human being is never done. So we’re always witnessing each other in states of transformation. But when you’re raising a child, you get to really see consciousness emerging in this powerful way, and you’re witnessing all the different ways that agency can express itself. It starts with just reaching for things. You become very attuned to this tiny pair of eyes. What are they tracking?
David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, talks about the self as a bundle of perceptions. That version or formulation of the self is very available when you’re spending a lot of time with the subjectivity of an infant. Before I had a kid, I knew learning to crawl was obviously going to change things, but I hadn’t thought about how crawling then becomes a language with which desire and intention can be articulated in a new way. Now this creature can tell you, I’m interested in this thing [through their movement]. Getting to watch that whole process unfolding feels so new to me and very different from the ways in which I was encountering the complexities of subjectivity in my other relationships.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
That is such a satisfying answer. It makes total sense that seeing a consciousness develop—and witnessing such a physical expression of that development—makes it more salient. I remember watching my daughter want something for the first time, watching her reach. It was fascinating. To what degree do you think that wanting is the ultimate expression of selfhood?
Leslie Jamison
To me, selfhood is a product of forces in collision. “What happens when desire collides with fear, or shame, or the conflicting desires of others?” I’m drawn to wanting as a way to start thinking about character and consciousness, whether it’s my own character on the page or someone else’s or an imagined character. Some of that might come artistically from my background as a fiction writer where desire is often a way that fictional characters are spoken about. I’ve had many, many fiction workshop instructors who were like, ‘what do your characters want?’ That’s the engine of the story, the way into understanding character. That’s a little bit more submerged when it comes to nonfiction.
It’s so interesting to think about how wanting intersects with fear. How does wanting intersect with restraint? How does the part of oneself that wants intersect with the part of oneself that understands somebody else might want something different? Selfhood is not just made of the wanting, but it’s made of how one engages with the desires of others.
In Splinters, there is the self that wants to take care of her daughter, the self that wants to be in love, the self that wants to be totally free, the self that wants to be in a binding contract with something or someone, the self that wants to make art, the self that wants to be needed, the self that wants to need nothing. These desires don’t all coexist peacefully. I think selfhood exists not just in the independent wanting of all of those things, but in the consciousness that organizes, reconciles, chooses between and integrates all of those various vectors of desire.
I don’t think that the ‘managerial self’ that’s figuring out how to relate to all these desires needs to be construed as primarily withholding or self-denying. We don’t have to think of ourselves as entirely surrendered to our wanting, and we also don’t have to think of the only alternative to surrender as restriction or denial. We can find ways to think of our desires as collaborators rather than competitors. I mean, in a way, this is a sort of an expansion or a continuation of the thinking about feeling that’s happening in Empathy Exams. There, I’m less interested in the conception of feeling as something that happens to you, and more interested in a conception of feeling that involves intentionality and agency. How do we relate to the feelings that we have? This is similar to the idea that selfhood is not just desire, but how one relates to desire.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
How do you see gender interacting with this idea of the self as a broader consciousness that is reconciling many desires?
Leslie Jamison
If the self is made of many conflicting vectors of desire—as well as the air traffic controller orchestrating these vectors of desire—then I think women are often socialized to privilege certain vectors over other ones. Coaxed to feel a sense of shame, like, “I shouldn’t want this, I shouldn’t want that.” I think women are more heavily socialized towards feeling that some desires are more socially acceptable than other desires. It’s great to desire to be a wonderful mother, to take care of your children, to nurture, to put importance on the needs of other people. Desires that take you away from your children are less acceptable than the desires that bring you back to them.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
How, if at all, were you intentionally contradicting or challenging traditional narratives about women in Splinters?
Leslie Jamison
Certainly presenting motherhood and art-making as forces that fed each other in compelling ways, rather than only being in competition. There is also something powerful about just putting certain female experiences in the same character in the same room, like breastfeeding and an STD. I hadn’t read very many stories in which those two things happened at once. Because what are they pointing towards? Motherhood and sexual freedom or motherhood and sexual desire. I was interested in writing against the cultural scripts that are still engaged in Madonna-whore binaries. Splinters is challenging the ways we want to bifurcate women into ‘holy, virtuous mother’ and ‘unholy, selfish slut’, or some formulation that implicitly or explicitly shames the making of mistakes or recklessness, as if a mother should be past that. My interest in the multitudes contained by the self is already pushing back against a lot of scripts of female identity that we have.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
In Splinters, you write about your frequent worry that leaving your ex would cause harm. You confessed this worry to your friend, who encouraged you to recognize that everyone causes harm, and suggested that the important thing was to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. This made me think of Carol Gilligan’s book In a Different Voice. She writes about how women are socialized to organize their morality around the ideas that care is virtuous, and harm is wrong. She is interested in abortion as an event which can push one to see that, within a morality of care, self-abnegation is immoral. In this way, abortion reminds me of divorce. In both, the woman can make a moral decision even while knowing that it may cause harm because the woman herself is also one who should be cared for. You write about abortion in Empathy Exams and divorce in Splinters. I wondered about your thoughts as to the similarities between these two topics: abortion and divorce.
Leslie Jamison
I think women especially can feel tempted to tell themselves something is only a permissible choice if it’s essentially not a choice at all. I am not interested in making a universalizing argument about the similarities between abortion and divorce, but I am certainly interested in the deep amount of shame that can attach to both choices. In both cases, shame is often connected to a woman prioritizing her own wellbeing. In both cases that shame is in some way connected to the shame of a woman prioritizing her wellbeing. One of the things I was really interested in exploring in Splinters is a tendency I noticed in myself to want to narrate certain decisions in terms of my daughter’s wellbeing, whether that was sleep training, like, ‘oh, I have to do sleep training because it’s what’s best for her. She needs to learn how to sleep.’ I referenced a friend telling me it would be okay if sleep training was also for [me, the parent]. It would be okay to want to sleep for more than two hours at a time.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
Yes! Even if sleep training harms the child (and I’m not saying it does!) choosing it could in theory still be good, even within a morality of care. The mother deserves care, too.
Leslie Jamison
I don’t want to put it all on culture because I think with sleep training—and with lots of choices that we make— there’s a very tangible difficulty. It’s hard to hear your baby crying out for you. It’s hard to hear them crying out for you and not go to them. So it makes sense that you would want to have a framework for understanding what’s happening to them and why it can be good for them. But I also wanted to push through the ways that shame made me narrate certain choices as ‘for her.’ I wanted to claim what I wanted. In this sense, sleep training is a sort of step stool that takes me to this reckoning in the context of divorce. I could hear the ways in which I also wanted to make [the choice to leave my ex-husband] about [my daughter] because I felt that I could be a better mother if I wasn’t in an unhappy marriage. I felt ultimately that it was not a good thing for her to be in a home full of conflict. And these things are true. But I think there was also a kind of necessary breaking through of the gauzy scrim that shame had created to hide a self-interest that I had been taught to believe was vile. Self-interest itself is really seen as shameful, but is it inherently a bad thing to have some concern for one’s own wellbeing? So I think the shame that can attach to divorce is to me deeply connected to the shame of a woman prioritizing her own happiness and taking seriously her own happiness as an end in itself.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
Are there ways that you feel like your daughter is being strengthened and enriched by growing up in two households?
Leslie Jamison
I’m not quite ready to talk about that yet. I’m practicing drawing boundaries in interviews, so thank you for giving me a chance to do that! I think a prior version of me felt that if my work had taken up the subject of my life at all, then I was obligated to answer any question about my life. It was almost like, if I brought a boy home, I had to do everything he wanted to do because I had brought him there. But I’ve come to realize that people are going to ask all kinds of things in interviews, and I don’t have to answer all of it. I hope you can hear the collaborative feeling in this answer—it feels like we’re figuring out something together, about what an interviewer and a subject can do.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
This is like the part of Splinters when the ex-philosopher was breaking up with you on the steps of the church. He asked you if you wanted a hug, and you said no.
Leslie Jamison
I always take note of moments where I feel surprised by something I’ve said or something I’ve done. Because to me, the moment where the ex-philosopher says, “can I give you a hug?” and I say no…just that word ‘no’ surprised me. So many parts of myself have been designed and seduced towards the project of always pleasing and accommodating. But those moments of surprise are moments of self-reckoning where you’re meeting some new part of yourself, maybe even glimpses of self transformation.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
Would you say that attending to those moments of surprise is one way that you write essays and memoir that are, as Esmé Weijun Wang put it, “unstinting” and “unsparing”?
Leslie Jamison
There are all sorts of moments, moments that I think of as ‘rupture moments’ or ‘signal moments’ that feel like invitations to pick apart some particularly fraught or vexed feelings. Certainly moments of shame or embarrassment, moments of self-surprise, moments of daydreaming or longing that can’t quite come out into the light yet, moments of lying… all of these feel like signal flares—like when people in movies are stranded in the wilderness or on an island and they send up a flare. Those fraught, tricky, knotted feelings are like signal flares sent up from the wilderness of the self. They tell us there’s something down in the thickets or the underbrush that’s worth exploring.
NONFICTION
Splinters
By Leslie Jamison
Little Brown and Company
Published February 20, 2014
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