Splinters

How do you carry love forward when the vessel that once held it—marriage, certainty, youth—has cracked? In Splinters, Leslie Jamison argues that love doesn’t vanish when its first container breaks; it recomposes itself in fragments—mother-love, friend-love, art-love, self-love—demanding new forms of ritual, attention, and responsibility. She contends that the story you can live with after rupture is not a clean arc or a single redemption but a mosaic: vivid shards of newborn nights and divorce papers, museum benches and courtroom elevators, prayer and Prozac-era sobriety, a toddler’s two-finger lullaby and a co-parent’s fury.

At heart, the book is a memoir of motherhood and marriage’s end, but its subtler ambition is to teach you an ethics of attention. Jamison proposes that paying close attention—to an infant’s breath, to a chastened afternoon light on Coney Island, to an old photograph or a difficult ex—becomes a spiritual practice that turns chaos into meaning. The practice doesn’t fix life; it makes life bearable, even beautiful, while remaining honest about harm. If Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts braided theory and new motherhood, and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work named its ambivalences, Jamison’s Splinters insists on both/and: solemn love and feral hunger, care and art, devotion and desertion.

What she argues

Jamison insists that love survives in pieces. Her marriage to “C”—a relationship that starts with a high-velocity Vegas elopement and glows with loyalty, tattoos, and grief’s afterimage—ends in anger and court filings. Yet love doesn’t end there. It splinters into the nightly liturgy of reading to a daughter (Ione), into gratitude for the caregiver Soraya in Crown Heights, into the way a stuffed Minnie travels in a brown paper bag between two apartments, and into the stubborn practice of seeing beauty at the Brooklyn Museum or beside the toxic shimmer of the Gowanus Canal. She argues that attention isn’t a consolation prize you collect after failure; it’s a technology for living with contradiction—and for making art inside a life of diapers, deadlines, and drop-offs.

The canvas: three acts that rhyme with our lives

The book moves through three sections—Milk, Smoke, Fever—that mirror phases many of us recognize. Milk is the vertigo and plenitude of early motherhood: the hospital “Billy lights,” latch classes, a mesh-underwear body and a newborn who only sleeps on your chest. Smoke is divorce and desire: custody calendars, an order-of-protection vocabulary you never planned to learn, an affair with a tattooed musician who texts from Scottish ferries and Phoenix freeways, and the humbling discovery that wanting doesn’t make a life sustainable. Fever is the pandemic crucible: single parenting with COVID in an apartment lit by sirens, teaching on Zoom after bedtime, tastes and smells returning one by one like long-lost cousins.

Across these acts, Jamison threads the two great apprenticeships of the book—mothering and making—and keeps refusing a false choice between them. She writes while pumping in faculty bathrooms, fact-checks from a hospital bed after a C-section, and remembers how Lea Lublin once installed a crib in a Paris museum—motherhood, displaced into art, and art, displaced back into life. She visits Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party while pushing a sleeping infant in endless loops, and she sits with Garry Winogrand’s color slides until their ordinary people become her cathedral of the everyday.

Why it matters now

If you’ve navigated a breakup while parenting, co-parented through bitterness, or tried to keep faith with your work when the calendar belongs to a toddler and a dean, Splinters will feel like someone finally wrote your inner life in full sentences. Its gift is not tidy advice but usable truths: that harm and care can sit side by side; that your child’s joy doesn’t absolve you, but it can save you; that your attention expands to meet what you love; and that the ordinary is not what’s left after wonder—it’s where wonder waits.

A small credo

“Sometimes the solution has nothing to do with the problem.” The book returns to this recovery wisdom again and again—beauty beside rage, sturdiness beside shame, a museum bench beside a custody hearing.

What this summary will cover

You’ll first enter early motherhood’s strange abundance and its apprenticeship to attention. Then you’ll trace the arc from doubt to Vegas vows to divorce and co‑parenting, and how anger becomes both hazard and shield. You’ll meet the village that makes a single mother’s life possible and the museum rooms that turn seeing into prayer. You’ll walk through desire after divorce—the musician with Safeway roses at Sky Harbor, the ex‑philosopher with a rooftop Jacuzzi—and learn what these dead ends teach about hunger and boundary. Finally, you’ll open the pandemic chapter where illness, work, and love are forced to coexist inside one apartment—and why that pressure clarifies what endures.

Jamison’s wager is modest and radical: your life will never be free from contradiction, but your attention can make a home big enough to hold it. That home might look like two apartments and a brown paper bag carrying Minnie Mouse back and forth. It might look like a mother kneeling at the Gowanus fence while her toddler pushes a twig into a poisoned canal and calls it an airplane. Either way, love goes on—splintered, yes, but no less luminous for its fractures.

Jamison reframes early motherhood from a story of deprivation (no sleep, no time, no self) to one of overwhelming plenitude. The newborn days are not an emptying but a flooding—of hours, hormones, need, milk, and meaning—that forces you to learn a new kind of attention. The catalog is tactile and unglamorous: mesh underwear, avocado-sized blood clots, Dorito-dusted couches, steam radiators that clang like imprisoned elves at 3 a.m., and a baby who will sleep only on your chest. When “latch class” feels like junior high again—other mothers in striped nursing tees whose babies seem to sip beautifully—Jamison confesses her open container of shame and keeps trying. The point isn’t mastery; it’s presence.

The myth of deprivation

People warned her that motherhood would take everything away: sleep, freedom, ambition. Instead, it gave her more time—because she never slept. Nights stretched into strange continents of watching Australian model shows while a newborn breathed milk-sweet onto her collarbone. The hours did not empty; they thickened. Yes, the labor is constant (the baby will only sleep if held; the “cheating swaddles” are labyrinths of Velcro), but Jamison shows how fullness can feel like drowning and also like grace. You’ll recognize this if you’ve ever realized a 2 a.m. feeding is the only silence in your week—and also not silence at all.

An apprenticeship to attention

Mothering sensitizes sight the way eyes adjust to a dark room. Jamison memorizes London plane vs. silver maple; she watches plum-colored Winogrand sunsets on museum walls; she learns to see the ordinary as news. Attention, she suggests, is a survival tactic for the monotony (“milk and diapers, milk and diapers”) and a portal into the holy—what Chesterton once called a “street of splendid strangers.” Her baby’s mittens twitch like birds. Cherry blossoms become a sticky paste on curious hands. She hoards these details not because they are unique but because they are hers (cf. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s devotion to dailiness; or Annie Dillard’s liturgies of looking).

The matrilineal braid

Jamison’s mother—an anthropologist and public health scholar—becomes a third body in the room: bringing water during marathon feedings, whispering to the newborn, “You know how your mama loves you? That’s how I love her.” Their closeness is not abstraction; it’s crackers sliced into chevrons and two-month sublets for postpartum rescue. It’s also permission: her mother once left a baby for three weeks to work in Burkina Faso and came back to a child who cried in her arms. That story becomes a blessing and an ache—proof that a mother can leave and love remains. So Jamison nurses and emails fact-checks from the hospital at 3 a.m., guilty and grateful, and claims both.

Art, displaced into life—and back

Two artists are touchstones. Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party makes her hunger for a lineage of women’s work and women’s bodies—Sappho’s vulva, Sojourner Truth’s three faces (one crying, one angry, one masked). Lea Lublin’s Mon Fils—placing a crib in a Paris gallery—authorizes the seepage between parenting and art. Jamison loves the photographs but distrusts their curated bliss. Where are the tantrums? The failures? So she writes those into the record: the eleven-day-old whose crying makes her bang her head softly against the wall while keeping the baby steady in her arms; the sleep training mantra whispered between five‑minute intervals: “You are okay.” The gallery can’t hold these scenes; the page can.

Plenitude’s ethics

Motherhood is not sainthood; it’s logistics braided with desire. Jamison leaks through a Versace blouse at a photo shoot because the noon feeding slid to 12:30. She pumps in university bathrooms while students queue for the sink; she asks a male colleague to give her an hour of office privacy and hears, “We’re all in the same boat,” which is true only if everyone is lactating. The memoir doesn’t purify care; it politicizes it (see Angela Garbes, Essential Labor). It shows how class, workplace design, and gender stories make care harder than it needs to be—and how you can still insist on your work, your love, and your baby’s nap.

Working principle

Plenitude is not tidy. It’s a sink full of pump parts and a paragraph built on napkins. You don’t wait for permission; you displace—crib into gallery, laptop into hospital, art into milk, milk into art.

Jamison’s marriage begins like a fever dream—four days after a third date in a Catskills motel hung with Siegfried-and-Roy photos, a midnight chapel in Las Vegas, steak by room service, a tattoo of her face on C’s arm. The fervor isn’t frivolous; it’s a willful bet against her history of second-guessing. She wants a life you can’t undo. C is older, magnetic, and seamed with grief after caring for a first wife through leukemia. His tenderness (calling homeless men “Sir,” instinct to work crisis hard) lives beside a gruff candor that reads as authenticity. To Jamison, he is a truth-teller who sees through her performances and wants her real.

Passion’s momentum

The early love is a private folklore: cinnamon bears on dashboards; Lloyd Dobler mixtape vibes; Golden Nugget vows; motel ceilings painted like skies. There’s an intoxicating relief in deciding—no more dithering under “the shadow of the question mark,” as a friend calls it. Jamison’s earlier relationship (with Dave, in an Iowa farmhouse of poets and octopus hors d’oeuvres) taught her that intensity doesn’t equal viability. With C, certainty becomes a discipline: she chooses vows before doubts can gather. It’s a strategy many of us attempt—deploy conviction as antidote to ambivalence.

The shadow of prior grief

But C’s first marriage is the house this love lives in. A drunk at a party once asks who C would save from a fire—first wife or new—articulating the unspeakable: another woman’s death is nested in their bed. Jamison tries to mature into this reality, surrendering the fantasy of being someone’s only great love. The triumphalism of their Vegas sprint doubles as proof they have a “great love, too.” When her own book later gets more attention than C’s tender novel about leukemia, a thorn lodges. She wants to buoy him and inhabit her success; he wants support without pep talks. The hurt is ordinary and unglamorous. So is resentment.

When vows meet days

After their daughter’s birth, they move into corners of the same apartment: she with the glider and gray light, he with the laptop and red couch. The “closed world” of Jamison, baby, and her visiting mother leaves him outside the door—something he names in therapy with a helpless candor that is both true and indicting. Over time, Jamison reads micro-barometers of his anger the way some read weather: molecule shifts before a storm. The “humility” of coaxing a wailing newborn shifts into a home where love becomes legible primarily as sacrifice—wincing nipples, interrupted sleep—rather than shared delight. They still laugh (American Ninja Warrior becomes their vinegar cutting the oil of resentment), but the daily ratios change.

Why the promise broke

This isn’t a morality play. There’s no affair causing the collapse (she states that plainly). What breaks is the bridge between inner life and shared life. “It was easier to retreat into my bond with my daughter,” Jamison admits, than to risk intimacy where she felt judged. C’s anger escalates during separation—epithets in vestibules, spit on a stoop—making it easier for her to feel justified, but she refuses to let that absolve her. She holds two truths at once: she caused deep harm by leaving; she won’t live with that anger. If Joan Didion mapped the disorientation of grief inside marriage (The Year of Magical Thinking), Jamison maps grief after marriage—the brave, unsexy work of refusing a story that either demonizes or exonerates you.

The unsentimental inventory

Vegas vows mattered. So did the way a bad day could make a greenhouse paltry. The story you can live with includes both.

When Jamison moves out with her thirteen-month-old, co‑parenting begins with an animal truth: her body still believes the child belongs inside it. She kneels on their old carpet and begs not to lose two nights a week—the only time she “gets on her knees.” C, in pain, reminds her he was the first to hold their daughter in the operating room. Their therapists don’t offer fairy‑tale but/excepts. Instead, Jamison receives a harder grammar: “There will be an impact, and your response will sit beside that impact.” The goal is not erasing harm but adjoining it with care.

The courtroom and the crib

Divorce becomes a world of retainers and purple-foil chocolates in skyscraper lobbies; of “irretrievable differences” that sound like you dropped your marriage down a storm drain. On paper, nights divide. In life, an empty travel crib glows with absences: not‑cutting orange slices, not‑washing a high chair, not‑zipping footie pajamas. Jamison fills the first Wednesday and Sunday with plans to spackle the hole. It works until it doesn’t. She learns to sit inside the quiet, to watch her daughter return with C’s cadences in her voice (“C is for cookie,” sung in another home’s rhythm) and feel the ghost wind of a life happening where she is not.

Anger as shield—and as clarity

C’s rage at separation—the kind that closes throats and flings words—turns drop‑offs into Russian roulette. Jamison’s recovery rooms help her name anger’s physics: it can be a way to endure grief without looking at it directly. It also hardens boundaries. The angrier he gets, the less she can imagine any alternate life in which staying would have been right. Yet she stays open to evidence of his love’s good places: the way he sweeps their daughter up on his stoop as she runs toward him; the cupcake flushed down a toilet that sends a letter from the ocean, clearly written by a father who can still make magic.

Two homes, one child, and ritual bridges

The brown paper bag that ferries Minnie Mouse between houses becomes a sacrament. So do phrases—“Take care,” “Take care”—on a pre-pandemic curb. Jamison attends to bridges because the structures around her encourage rupture: broken buzzers, hostile silence, a custody schedule that can feel like a referendum on maternal worth. She practices noticing continuity anyway: a shared lullaby across town; Winnie-the-Pooh sticker families that go to Dad’s in Ziplocs and come home with one small hair on a back, a relic of the life she no longer shares with the man she once married.

The ethics of both/and

No-fault divorce says you don’t need a villain to be free, but mother-culture still demands one to feel clean. Jamison resists. She will not weaponize being “the one who left” as either shame tattoo or purified martyrdom. She articulates a humane standard: be honest about harm, build the best possible life inside what’s left, and keep enlarging your child’s circle of love even when yours with your ex has narrowed to a necessary silence. It’s pragmatic mercy (see Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living for a sister text on post‑marriage ethics).

A practice

Find one bridge and honor it—a stuffed animal in transit, a song sung in two homes, a brief exchange that keeps human in view. The bridge won’t fix the river. It will let you cross.

If Splinters has a religion, it’s attention. Jamison keeps walking her daughter through the Brooklyn Museum until the galleries become a second nursery and the art her set of godparents. Garry Winogrand’s color slides—a teenage girl haloed against sky, old women playing cards, flight attendants perched on asphalt—turn into stained glass of regular life. At MoMA, an exhibition of anonymous home movies renders birthday cakes and sleds into liturgy. Even the Gowanus Canal, slicked with “black mayonnaise,” becomes sacramental—a place where the ugly keeps catching sunlight.

The ordinary as cathedral

Jamison claims benches as pews and block quotes as prayers. She adores the moments that insist: these people literally give off light. This isn’t sentimentality. It’s training. When co‑parenting feels like an autopsy report and work like triage, the practice of seeing becomes a counter‑economy to rage and despair. It’s also a pedagogy for her daughter, who learns that a catalpa pod is a guitar and a stone banister is a slide; that a twig in polluted water can be an airplane. Beauty is less an attribute than a verb—made by use.

The gift and the hold

Reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift in her lawyer’s lobby, Jamison confronts a hard reciprocity: art comes to you as a gift, and you should move it along like a gift, but love isn’t ownership. Hold too tightly and you crush the thing. That line is freeing and punitive. Aren’t there things you should hold—like a toddler? The answer isn’t philosophical; it’s practical. She nurses at drop‑off and sings at pick‑up. She writes in coffee shops with napkin outlines while her baby learns to nap in motion. She lets gifts circulate (art, stories, toys), and she builds containers that don’t crush them.

Recovery as liturgy of noticing

Jamison’s sobriety isn’t backstory; it’s a daily grammar. Women’s meetings across from cemeteries hold her shame without swallowing it. Prayer becomes kneeling on a bath mat, asking for help from the god of shampoo bottles, which is to say: asking, period. Recovery slogans surface like bumper-sticker koans—“feelings aren’t facts,” “one day at a time”—and she treats them not as bromides but as choreography for attention. When a museum can’t be reached (pandemic), she builds a cardboard road with her child and writes Sylvia Plath lines on an old diaper box, then lets toddler scribbles edit the poem. Art still happens; form just change addresses.

A workable awe

Awe, here, isn’t fireworks; it’s survival. A toddler’s two fingers in her mouth after a cough. The first peanut butter’s scent returning post‑COVID like a distant cousin. The way a man with a metal detector combs a poisoned bank and keeps believing. This “workable awe” doesn’t solve the problem of custody or the ache of desire; it gives you a better surface to place them on, so they don’t roll away.

Pocket benediction

Attention won’t make a life tidy. It will make it habitable.

Splinters is also a love letter to the female infrastructures that keep a life going. Jamison names her matrilineal line (mother, grandmother from Saskatoon), her godmothers (Colleen, Kyle), and her caregiver (Soraya from Trinidad) not as cameos but as co‑authors of survival. “Planet Women,” as she calls her post‑separation world, is a place where people bring ancient grains from Trader Joe’s and stay in hospital rooms on C‑section nights; where a godmother reads drafts across decades and brings you back to yourself when you’ve become a story you don’t believe.

Care as practical magic

Soraya keeps oatmeal ratios sacred and gets mittens onto tiny hands with a competence that feels like sorcery. She texts, “She’s hungry,” and Jamison weeps on a subway platform and sprints home. The humiliation of need loosens. Meanwhile, Colleen flies from Egypt and stocks the freezer; Kyle hosts potlucks and also names hard truths (confessing “fatigue” at Jamison’s serial thresholds—sobriety, marriage, divorce—so intimacy can grow on real ground). This is friendship not as echo chamber but as boundary and balm (see Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman, Big Friendship).

Work inside the mess

Teaching returns her to a self she can like: granular, generous, allergic to cocktail‑party versions. She pumps at her desk between student conferences, shakes droplets from flange parts, and turns a shared office into a lactation room with paper towels and will. She writes about Donald Judd’s boxes while her toddler insists they’re jungle gyms, and she accepts the truth: the essay must be built in the time a nap gives you. The institution is not designed for this (adjuncts without offices, colleagues walking in), but she keeps refusing the false binary of vocation vs. mothering. They’re messily codependent and stubbornly co‑generative.

Class, gratitude, and suspicion

The memoir is candid about privilege and its discontents: a divorce lawyer with a second home in Sag Harbor; green juices and Versace blouses; gratitude that can feel like hush money when institutions don’t offer real support. Jamison doesn’t clean this up. She lets the reader feel the pull between “I’m lucky” and “this system is broken,” especially for the less powerful (think maintenance workers figuring out where to pump). Her gratitude for help is sincere. Her suspicion of why she must feel so grateful is political.

Operational takeaway

Build a roster of women who can tell you the truth and bring soup. Call that roster your religion.

When the marriage ends, hunger doesn’t. Jamison falls into a long-distance affair with a musician—the “professional tumbleweed” whose chest is inked and whose tenderness for stray animals doubles as a brand. He sends Safeway roses at Sky Harbor, finger‑texts from tour vans, and two suitcases materialize outside Veselka like prophecy: sex and departure, already staged. The romance is intoxicating because it’s story‑rich—hiraeth texts about a home that never existed, emojis at 3 a.m., shared haikus of doom and attraction—and because it lets her be consumed again, like the old intoxication without alcohol.

The drug of escalation

Both Jamison and the singer are sober alcoholics; they recognize the neural itch for more. Their WhatsApp thread becomes a hearth. Desire works like a stimulant: thrilling, present‑tense, infinitely narratable. Then it meets logistics: a toddler who won’t nap on schedule; a chlamydia diagnosis; a text that says he wished the child wasn’t there, honest and devastating. The affair ends not in scandal but in the same place it began—story. He had told her who he was (non‑monogamous by conviction). She wanted to be the exception. Many of us do.

Learning from the crash

What remains is usefulness: proof that she can still feel, and that hurt can be informative without being fatal. Later, with the ex‑philosopher in the glass high‑rise (the self‑professed “rom‑com villain”), she encounters another appetite: to be the one good enough to break a pattern. His complaint—that their conversations are “85% as good as they could be”—exposes an old compulsion to audition, to spread hummus correctly, to be the most interesting person in the room. When he ends things on church steps, she does something new: he asks for a hug; she says no. The small boundary is a tectonic plate moving. It matters.

Owning hunger, setting guardrails

Jamison stops treating hunger as an indictment and calls it data. She wanted a partner who could share parenting’s tedium and its ecstasy; she kept dating men optimized for other lives. Wanting wasn’t the error. Misplacing the want was. The lesson isn’t asceticism; it’s proportion. You can have sex that feels like a new self and not turn it into a home. You can also insist that a home is where someone notices Band‑Aids are out and goes to get them. Desire is neither sin nor savior. It’s a current you swim in with a life jacket: honesty with yourself, boundaries with others, a bias toward the future your child will inhabit with you.

Working boundary

Believe people when they tell you who they are. Then decide if that story holds the life you need.

The pandemic compresses Jamison’s life into a two‑bedroom crucible: a toddler, a virus that steals smell and strength, sirens outside, Zoom classes after bedtime, and a child’s cardboard road drawn on a diaper box. She describes “vector’s shame” on the stairwell, counting days since fever, posting notes for neighbors, waiting for peanut butter to taste like itself again. Quarantine doesn’t invent loneliness; it isolates existing contradictions: caregiver and breadwinner, teacher and mother, body sick and body needed by a small person now.

Quarantine arithmetic

With childcare suspended, she builds a day from glue sticks and counting games. “Reading time, dance time, octopus‑cutout chores,” until the schedule becomes fiction and the real curriculum is endurance. On the first night without her daughter (post‑isolation), she meets the ex‑philosopher in Prospect Park and feels the rock press into her back like subtext: even reunion is uncomfortable. Back home, they bake cookies at midnight and drink cold milk in socks. The sweetness feels illicit and necessary. Meanwhile, co‑parenting resumes: six‑mile stroller walks for drop‑off and pick‑up because buses feel like risk; a shared world reconstructed by foot.

The toddler as teacher

Jamison’s child names everything “mama” and “baby”—pasta, carrots, circles on cul‑de‑sacs—teaching a theology of care: everything belongs to someone, or is held by something larger. The daughter tucks a tube of Clorox wipes into bed, bib and all, and “makes rainbow tea” so her mother can respond to one last email. She also rips a cigarette to tobacco ribbons in the middle of a Zoom reading, placing the author’s contradictions back in frame. The lesson is less adorable than clarifying: children expose the whole of our lives to us and to others. That exposure isn’t failure; it’s truth.

Reopened thresholds

As smell returns in flickers, so does awe. Peanut butter becomes a visiting relative. A man in a mask on a casket warehouse dock becomes a testament to keeping on. The Rockaways host families with neon Dorito fingers and a solitary man whose blanket corners stay square—two models of control, both tender. Jamison refuses a pure feeling; she chooses the compromised good—love with history, mothering with work, joy with ache. She ends not with a fused family but a big enough world: two apartments and one child alive in both, a mother’s scar that will always ache when shorts rub its seam, and a night that holds after the light fades.

Lasting line

You don’t get a life without fracture. You get a life where fracture glows—because you look at it long enough to see it shine.