In Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Leslie Jamison writes that the story at hand is about “the great emptiness inside, the space I’d tried to fill with booze and sex and love and recovery and now, perhaps, with motherhood.” She doesn’t mean a gauzy, filtered kind of motherhood, but rather her fierce love for her daughter and the aftermath of a painful divorce.

“I always write from spaces of when and how I find myself challenged and rearranged. There was a tremendous force pushing me to try and put motherhood into language, because I always try to put into language experiences that overwhelm me and baffle me, and motherhood certainly did both,” Jamison recently said over Zoom.

Splinters consists of a series of essays, which Jamison describes as “short, sharp pieces,” structured to evoke “experiences that lodge inside of you and become part of you, but often in a quite painful or broken way.” Across pages, Jaimson demonstrates what readers of her earlier titles, The Empathy Exams and The Recovering, know to be true—she excels at drilling into raw experiences and uncomfortable truths until they reveal something transcendent about our existence as flawed humans in a chaotic world.

Writing about motherhood, something she describes as “an experience that really transforms every crevice and aspect of being,” led Jamison to become more resolute in her approach to her work. “I had to double down on a belief that is already at the core of my aesthetic practice, which is that an experience doesn’t have to be extraordinary in order to be illuminating, and that writing from my own life or anybody writing from their own life isn’t predicated on the belief that their life is more special or interesting than anyone else’s. You just have to believe, okay, this is what I’ve lived and I believe I have something to say about it. And I’m going to try and figure out what that something is,” she said.

In advance of Splinters’ release, Jamison spoke with Vanity Fair about experiencing grief and love simultaneously, and writing about the moments in which we find ourselves “challenged and rearranged.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: What was the genesis for Splinters? When did you realize that these experiences of divorce and parenting would be at the center of your next book?

Leslie Jamison: This book really began with a particular moment in my life, which was moving into this dark railroad sublet right next to a firehouse with my daughter after the end of my divorce. It was such a tender, exhilarating, terrifying, grief-stricken time. It was all those things at once. I wanted to write into those bare nerve ending days and nights, and that simultaneity of feeling such grief and such love at the same time. That was really where the book began, writing grief and love all twined together: grief at my marriage and love for my daughter and trying to make sense of how those feelings coexisted. That was the motivating urgency at the start.

In Splinters, you’re looking at all the various selves, or parts of yourself, that existed before you became a wife and mother. There’s a moment where you meet up with an old friend, and you describe that bond, that friendship, as allowing all your previous selves to coexist, rather than having to pretend you’re someone you’re not. It describes those lifelong, deep friendships so well.

I love that you connected that idea of splinters and the maybe painful continuities of selfhood, the memories or parts of yourself that you can’t ever fully let go of or fully purge. There’s a flipside, which is the consolidating aspects of carrying your prior selves with you and being in relationships where all of those prior selves can be present. I think there’s a way in which the book is exploring those dynamics or intimate relationships in which you feel like all of you can be present. And then, what are those other kinds of dynamics where you have to curate yourself? I think that’s one of the roles that some of the men in the book are playing too, and it’s less to vilify them and more to say there’s something in the way I’ve related to men that has involved a lot of self-curation, and that when you can let go of that self-curation it feels like exhaling. It feels like being in the room.

You write about a moment where a guy breaks up with you and then asks for a hug. Instead of obliging, you say, “No,” which I found hilarious and also kind of a moment to cheer. That felt like such a shift in your character, a real change as you went through your divorce and then started dating other people.

That was definitely a moment of being surprised by the word coming out of my mouth because it’s not a word that’s easy for me to say. There is always kind of a thrill in those moments where we aren’t quite who we think we are. Sometimes I talk to my writing students about this idea of “not myself writing,” which is to say: What are moments or times in your life when you didn’t feel like yourself? I think it’s illuminating to write straight into those moments where you can find yourself wanting to say, “Oh, that wasn’t like me at all,” but to think instead, “Well, that was me, so what part of me was unexpectedly or anomalously showing up in that moment?”

Authors who write about personal experience get asked this all the time, but how do you grapple with bringing people into the narrative, whether it’s your parents, your daughter, your ex-husband, or someone you dated?

One of the things I think the structure of this book did for me was allow me to tell only parts of the story, and not every part of the story. With so much personal narrative, one of the tricks of it is to do two things at once: One is to say exactly what you want to say and no more, which means a lot is not getting said, but you still give the reader a sense of a full experience. To make a reader feel they have been inside a fully formed book rather than a book with holes in it, while also knowing that every piece of art made from life is going to be a partial expression of that lived experience. So how to hold that wholeness of it as a work of art while also keeping the thing? These splinters allowed me to zero in on those moments of the personal story I wanted to tell while also leaving a lot of the messy business of leaving out. 

Do you let people read work before it’s published?

With all of my personal writing—and this has been true for more than a decade—I always offer anyone who appears in the text the opportunity to read it way before publication. I don’t assume they want to read it, I’ve learned that too. That was the case with this book. Pretty much everyone who is in it read it, and those processes are private ones. Every writer who writes from their life has their own reckoning with: “What do I owe other people? Where do the demands of art end and where do the demands of other people begin?” For me, a really important part of my process is sharing the work and giving people the chance to respond, and editing based on their responses. That doesn’t mean doing everything you want me to do, but it is having a dialogue. 

You write of your relationship with someone you call “Tumbleweed”: “It was so good to remember that someone could still think the best of me.” In the end, instead of feeling bitter towards him, you seem to embrace the relationship, as ill-fated as it was, as something necessary, maybe even beautiful. 

Not every relationship accrues value by adhering to a sort of heteronormative social script, like you meet, you date, you commit, you get married, you make a family. There was a part of me that felt like every relationship was sort of practicing for this great grand consummation. And that trajectory was a roller coaster where the tracks broke and my marriage ended and all the sudden my little roller coaster car was sailing off into the sky. I think once that script had broken for me it made more room for me to see relationships take all sorts of different forms, and even if this relationship isn’t going to end in marriage, there is a lot of living that can happen. With that road trip and feeling of freedom, part of what I was trying to write was that me as a narrator, as a character, as a human being in the world just holds a lot of different things at once. I am deeply devoted to my daughter, but that devotion isn’t tainted or compromised by also wanting to be in love and feel free and feel a little bit reckless. All those things were true at once. There’s a moment in the book where I ask: Do I want to be with the Tumbleweed or do I actually want to be the Tumbleweed, and I think those are interesting layers of relationships too. 

What does the sentiment “fetishizing the delusion of pure feeling and committing to the compromised version instead” mean for you? 

One of the grooves that my mind has fallen into over the years is that a feeling has to be entirely pointed in one direction. So what that means is if you love somebody, you always want to be with them, you love everything about them, you love who you are around them. You find the person with whom you don't have conflict, rather than finding the person with whom you can figure out how to muddle through conflict. Coming to some sense of the compromised version of feeling rather than the delusion of feeling is about coming to a sense of true intimacy and love that can hold lots of feelings at once.

My love for my daughter is not a pure feeling insofar as it holds only love and only worship. It also holds exhaustion, frustration, boredom, resentment. We do such a disservice to what love is and to the texture of our own inner lives when we treat those darker, more difficult feelings as pollutants. Instead of our job being to get those pollutants out, maybe it’s to name them, recognize them, accept their presence and shift the terms of a dynamic so they’re a little less present. Replacing the work of seeking purity or innocence or the uncontaminated with the work of muddling through, I think that’s most of the work of my adult life.

You write about witnessing your daughter’s imagination, and seeing that as this miraculous thing. Has your daughter influenced your writing at all?

Yes, tremendously. She just turned six, and so many things about her imaginative life have influenced my own. The other night she was playing a game she called “I thought I was right but I’m not actually right.” I was like, that’s amazing. You’re an amazing human being. I wish we were all better at playing that game all the time. There’s a way I see her working through these primal dilemmas in her play, like what it means to be with somebody and they don’t want to be with you, or what it means to not be right, what it means to be kidnapped when you feel like you’re in control. I feel like I’m inspired by what she knows without having to be told, which is that the imagination can be and is this powerful tool. 

You’re about to set off on a book tour, so is there anything you’re hoping to talk about along the way? Something that might not be obvious but that you hope the book brings up in some of the conversations?

Some of the parts of the book I’m most excited to talk about are these other forms of intimacy and relationships that the book is looking at besides the big two in literature, which are parenting and romance. Friendship and teaching are such important strands of this book for me. Sometimes subtitles are like the bane of a nonfiction writer’s existence, but I have to say the subtitle of this book means so much to me. I’m excited to talk about this book as a love story that looks a little different than most of our love stories. I’m imagining that reader who I don't know and might never meet who is walking through a bookstore and who sees the book and thinks, “Huh, another kind of love story. Maybe this book is for me.”