A mother-daughter love story

In Splinters, the American novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison leaves behind the issue of her addiction and recovery – the subject of her previous memoir, The Recovering (2018) – and takes us through her pregnancy, experience of childbirth, marriage, divorce and post-separation dating life. Each stage of her journey is related with the author’s trademark love of the telling detail:

On the postpartum ward my window ledge filled up with snacks from friends: graham crackers, cashews, cheddar cheese, coconut water, oranges with tiny green leaves.

Someone hands her a form to fill out. ‘Did I want bone broth?’ We can assume she does, as bone broth appears later on.

Much of Splinters recounts her marriage to the author Charles Bock – referred to throughout as ‘C’. When the two first meet, Jamison ‘recognised him immediately. His debut novel had gotten a glowing review on the cover of the New York Times Book Review’. They fall in love quickly and marry in an impromptu midnight ceremony in Las Vegas, Bock’s home town.

When their daughter is only a few weeks old, their incompatibility hits Jamison with force. A phone call comes through from the hospital to tell the couple that their baby’s recent illness is not the life-threatening ailment they had feared, and Jamison immediately tells her mother the good news. ‘Why did you turn to your mother first to tell her our daughter would be fine? Why not me?’ asks Bock. The answer is that Jamison needs her mother more than she needs her husband. Bock was still picking up the pieces from the death of his first wife, and they had, Jamison writes,

fallen from the false paradise of narrative, the idea that I might save him from his tragic loss, into the dirty nursery of our days, him alone in the back room while I did photo shoots in the front, leaking breast milk onto Versace.