Professor Leslie Jamison Unveils New Memoir, 'Splinters'

Associate Professor Leslie Jamison is set to release her next book, Splinters (Little, Brown and Company), in early 2024.

In Splinters, Jamison gives us a close-up view of her life and experiences. The book looks at feelings of loneliness, family relationships, and love. It also explores what it's like for a woman to be an artist, a mother, a teacher, and a lover all at once. Readers will follow along as she shares moments that place the magical and the mundane side by side in a striking way: breastfeeding in a shared office at the university, experiencing new love while driving on a wide-open road, and watching her daughter discover the world.

The bestselling author of The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (Bay Bay Books, 2019) and The Empathy Exams (Graywolf Press, 2014) delves into the questions of life that haunt us all: How do we find joy after experiencing loss? How can we find hope even when we've caused pain? At its heart, Splinters reveals Jamison's belief in the therapeutic power of storytelling and the quest for understanding, while acknowledging that some questions may never have definitive answers.

“Leslie Jamison’s blazing memoir kept me riveted for the single day it took to guzzle it down,” said Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of Lit and The Liar’s Club. “This wry, hilarious, and utterly unputdownable book is a gift that feels like an immediate hit and a forever classic.” 

Melissa Febos, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and national bestseller Girlhood, called Splinters 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.”

The book's cover, designed by Gregg Kulick and recently revealed by LitHub, hints at the main theme of the book: finding a way to make sense of confusion and chaos. “Working on one of Leslie’s books is always fun and Splinters didn’t disappoint,” Kulick told Lit Hub. “It was a long, winding road to get to this final cover, as you could expect with such a personal book, but I couldn’t be more thrilled with the result. We started off with just an image of Leslie on the cover. It was distressed in an unusual and arresting way—like a crumpled piece of paper—but it didn’t feel like alone it was telling the story we needed the cover to tell. As time went on, it really felt like a collage was the right motif to say what we needed to say, particularly with some of the artists Leslie considers in this memoir.”

Leslie Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of four books: two essay collections, Make It Scream, Make It Burn (Little, Brown and Company, 2019) and The Empathy Exams, as well as The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, and a novel, The Gin Closet (Free Press, 2011), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. The Empathy Exams was chosen as a Notable Book of 2014 and an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times. The Recovering was named the Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Entertainment Weekly and the best-reviewed memoir of 2018 by LitHub. Make It Scream, Make It Burn, and The Empathy Exams were finalists for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.