Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. This week we're sharing our favorite episodes from our sister podcast, Read This. It's the show where editor of the Monthly and Rabid Reader Michael Williams talks to some of the best and most respected writers in the world today. That person is American essayist and novelist Leslie Jameson, and Michael Williams is here to tell us a bit about the episode.
Hi Michael, Hi Ruby, Michael.
I'm a big fan of Leslie Jameson her work. It's incredible. It really manages to knit the very personal and very private moments with this kind of wider cultural commentary.
Yeah, there's this funny thing that happens periodically, which is a writer comes along and they have a certain degree of success, and then what happens is every second writer tries to emulate their style, you know, tries to ape the rhythms and the way they approach their subjects and tries to capture their voice again and again and generally falls short. Lesley Janison's one of those writers. Her first
book was called The Empathy Exams. It was initially an essay and then she turned it into this award winning collection and people absolutely lost their shit over the way in which she combined kind of journalism and reporting on the one hand, and literary criticism with psychology and then self disclosure, kind of utterly fearless ability to put herself and her own experiences into these essays in a way that didn't detract from the kind of scholarly and journalistic
venue but enhanced it. People love Leslie Jamison and with good reason.
And her latest book, it's been described as a divorce memoir.
Yes, it is about divorce, and it's a memoir, so all of that is fair. I mean, if you're a writer who's known for kind of excoriating explorations of your own life, the breakdown of your relationship must feel inevitably like it's going to be part of a book. But this one's also about kind of what it is to be a parent, but not just to parent. It's not
just about the pressures of a newborn baby. It's also about being a teacher, and about being an artist, a lover, all these different things, and part of what makes it such an interesting read is super fragmentary, these kind of short glimpses and things that dip in and out of her life and her experiences. It's really intimate and surprising, and the chat is much the same.
Coming up in just a moment Leslie jamerson'sch history.
One of the things for which you are most celebrated and beloved as a writer is the ways in which in your previous works of nonfiction you used a critical voice and criticism as a form to place a little bit of distance between the personal and your subject matter. And so I want to maybe begin there, because letting that go must have been an intense.
Yeah.
So one of the things that I not only believe but kind of viscerally need to do with each project is to do something that feels very different from anything I've done before, to feel both thrilled by that difference and a little humbled and bewildered by that difference, to feel like I'm sort of learning the new terrain and
texture and rules of any given project. And when I started to work on Splinters, I knew from very early on, I knew the emotional intensity that it was at its core, that it was going to be about the beginning of my daughter's life the end of my marriage, those two things happening roughly at the same time, and that it was very interested in that not of feeling at the center of my life in those days, that was feeling intense,
intoxicating love and deep grief at the same time. And it was really, more than anything, I think, interested in what it feels like for life to hold radically conflicting and different feelings at the same time. So that was like I knew the beating heart of it, and very early on I kind of discovered the rhythms and unit size of how I wanted to tell the story, which
is these very short splinters. Really these you know, the title is about form as well as content, these short splinters that are like vignettes of distilled, whittled shards of experience. And once I found the rhythm of those shards, I knew that I wanted.
The book to live very close to.
The personal almost the whole time, that it wanted to live in these little shards of prose and these distilled
fragments of experience, and that I wanted it. I wanted its intensity to rise from staying very close to my subjectivity, very close to my body, very close to my physical experience, very close to my emotional experience, not at all from a sense that my experience was inherently more interesting than anybody else's, but from a sense that the particular ferocity of this book was very related to that sense of proximity, and so I wanted to kind of follow that proximity.
And there is some criticism in the book, but you're right that it's a very different kind of criticism than shows up in a lot of my hybrid essays, where you sort of move from the personal to a more disembodied critical voice. And the criticism in this book is very embodied. It's me in galleries, engaging with art as I'm nursing my infant daughter, as I'm pushing my daughter in the stroller, as I'm kind of hungry for models of parent artists.
So you're always still right.
There, kind of in the casing of my skin, as you're looking out at the art. And I became really interested in how criticism itself functioned a little bit differently when it was embodied in that way.
Once you hit on that form, once you hit on the splinters or the shads, did that inform the territory that you had to traverse, Like once it was clear to you that okay, these are going to be as you say, concentrated, they're going to be immediate. They have to be a certain kind of true. Did you find yourself then within that logic making new discoveries about what had to be included.
Yeah, it's a great question, because I think what I felt more than anything once I discovered the shard or the splinter, as my form is, I felt a tremendous amount of freedom. I felt like I could come and go as I pleased in relation to my own experience, so that I could kind of dive into experience and extract very particular moments, extract, you know, the moment of me standing with my students at a cocktail party monologuing about how motherhood has made me more attuned to daily
life and the universe and everything around me. And then one of my students says, I think your daughter might be choking on a great you know, and it's sort of that. But I don't need to tell you what happened earlier that day. I don't need to tell you more about that party. I don't need to tell you what happened that later that night, Like I just need to give you that moment. And there was a lot of freedom and a lot of energy, I think, in just kind of whittling everything down.
To its essence.
But it also gave me a lot of freedom in terms of moving across time and space and life roles. So I dip back into my childhood and into my relationship to my parents' marriage, and into my kind of early relationship to divorce and what divorce could mean and how it could transform a life, and move between being a teacher, a mother, a lover, on a date with somebody new.
Like I just I could pivot as.
Much and as freely as I wanted once I found those shards, both in terms of chronology and in terms of emotional terrain. And so I think it was that ability to discard everything that wasn't absolutely necessary to the particular story I wanted to tell, and to kind of move in my little spaceship exactly where I wanted to go that felt really thrilling to me about the form and.
Also where you didn't want to go. I mean, you mentioned emotional terain, and one of the things that strikes me is as a subject matter, and obviously this might also be true of all kinds of things that we would write memoir about, but divorce and the breakdown of a relationship, particularly when there's a child involved, carries with it even societally, in the way we talk about it, in the way we narrativize it, all kinds of pockets of shame and an idea around privacy because you're not
the only person involved and you feel such complex emotions. How hard was it to work out what was appropriate and what was necessary to make the book what it should be.
Yeah, amazing question and very related to form and structure.
So I'm glad to be thinking about it in those terms because I think another thing that discovering the form of this book, the form of the Splinter, allowed me to do is tell precisely the parts of the story that I wanted to tell, and yes, leave a lot out, but hopefully leave a lot out in a way that doesn't give a reader a sense of the sort of violence of the curtain being forcibly drawn closed, like oh, here's this window, but you can't see what's in here. You know.
To create a work of art that feels whole.
And complete while leaving a lot of lived experience out not only you know, allows me to hopefully avoid repetition TDM redundancy but also to protect the privacy of yes, my ex husband, various members of our family. And I think that, you know, the part of the breakdown of my marriage that I was most interested in exploring was really grief. I didn't want to place blame. I didn't want to litigate old struggles and sort of convince a reader that somehow I had been right about all these
arguments we'd been having like that. That was just miles and miles away from the book I was.
Interested in writing. But what I did want to write was grief.
I wanted to write the grief of love ending, and I think even more specifically, I wanted to write the grief of having a vision for what a relationship might be and that vision never really coming to pass, and so in a way you're grieving not what was, but what could have been. And that was a grief I was interested in writing. So I knew the emotional dimensions of the marriage plot line that I was interested in
and also the parts that I wasn't interested in. But even within that, the process was quite ragged and imperfect, and I think revision was very helpful in terms of steering the manuscript away from these parentheticals. Where I still was kind of doing that thing where maybe I needed to get this little barbin or say, my little piece
about a way that I'd been wronged. And what's wonder about revising a manuscript is you don't have to You're not beholden to the first version of how you said of things.
But I think you.
Know, in the process of figuring out how to write the thread of this book that's about my marriage and it's dissolution, I also really benefited from the wisdom of
close friends and readers. And I remember, in particular the memois who's also a dear friend of mine, Mary Carr, read an early draft of the book and said, you never let us hope with you, like it's written too much through the gauze or the kind of dark veil of disappointment and regret, so that even when you're writing the early moments of your relationship, we feel their doom already embedded inside of them in your retrospective voice.
So what if you let us.
Inhabit them more fully, inhabit your hope, inhabit your love, and habit the good parts. And she said, I remember it really clearly because it was so wise and so immediately like, Oh, I don't necessarily want to hear the truth of what you're saying, but I recognize the truth of what you're saying. She said, you don't write the pain of divorce by writing what's.
Difficult about the divorce.
You write the pain of the divorce by writing deeply into the love that came before. So that was really some of the work of revision as well, was truly allowing myself to reinhabit the hope and kind of intoxicating love of the early years. But I do think there's something useful about the process of trying to find precise and accurate language for the things that torment you, And I do think that the process of writing a book
can be helpful in that regard. And maybe more than anything, I think that revision and what happens in the course of revision can be useful in kind of enacting the fact that it's possible to have a transforming relationship and an evolving relationship to the events of one's life, that one isn't stuck in a certain mode of feeling towards a thing that happened, that you can kind of tell the story and then tell it in a different way re excavate. For example, so much of what was beautiful
about the marriage. I did that for creative and aesthetic reasons in revising this book, but it actually also feels like a place where the truth of that early beauty can live. And there aren't, honestly that many places that I can currently live in my life, So to have this.
As a repository for just like there was.
So much of this love that to me remains beautiful and worthwhile and part of me even even though the marriage ended, it feels that felt like, oh, I can actually claim that, and I don't need anybody to agree with me for that to be a truth.
And you reflect on the evolution of the use of pronouns in the book, from my Daughter to the ways in which the act of writing, the act of narrativizing also both mirrors and drives a capacity to move.
Forward absolutely, and I think, yeah, I love that you brought up. I think of it as the pronoun subplot. You know that there are many subplots in this book, and the fraud grappling with.
That hour is it's also.
A kind of a secret reference to what I think of as one of the core Godmother.
Texts of this book, which is Elizabeth Hardwick's.
Sleepless Nights and amazing book. It's a stunning book. It's very much a book about divorce, although she's incredibly oblique
about it. But at one point she's describing all the furniture that she's brought from Boston to New York after what she calls a change in government, and she's describing, you know this, the tall high boy and the bookshelves, and she says, you know these these things had once in hours that tea bag of a word steeped in the conditional, and that was such a beautiful formulation of.
Like part of the heartbreak of divorce.
And a marriage ending. But it also felt like, yeah, this word hours is always a way into kind of emotional process of building a life together and then dismantling it and like what was ours?
What remains ours?
How both losing the hour and having to kind of grapple with the endurance of the hours are hard in different ways.
Coming up after the break, Leslie shares the frustrating ways in which women writing from their lives can often be dismissed as role or at less. Will be right back, I'm interested in how you approach the ways in which this as subject matter, divorce, parenting, lands engendered, ways that the expectations around women writing about this and about mothers writing about this, and the ways in which that represented a burden or a framework that you felt you had to push back against.
One of the overwriting truths I think here that I was certainly aware of is the ways that women writing from their lives making art from the material of what they've lived, And often the material of what they've lived has something to do with partnership, domesticity, various forms of caregiving, including caregiving for a child. That kind of art making is dismissed and misunderstood in a thousand ways that I
think have everything to do with gender. And sometimes sometimes it's dismissed in very explicit ways that it's somehow less ambitious than you know, writing about other people's lives and writing about war than writing about these kind of bigger social subjects. Sometimes it gets dismissed in more implicit or backhanded ways. You know, a text is called raw or vulnerable or confessional, and often these are sincerely meant, maybe as terms of praise, but sometimes to call.
A work raw is.
To act as if it hasn't been intensely crafted and sculpted. And I think so often the texture of honesty, intimacy, proximity, which are the things the experience, the reading experiences that I think are often being summoned with that word raw, are actually really totally a product of craft choices and decisions. How do you make a reader feel close to your experience? Well, it's not actually by transcribing your diaries or writing everything down.
It's often by really sculpting a particular version of the truth that can bring somebody that's not it's not an authentic for its sculpting. It's just it's it's it's it's artfulness, lies, and its ability to make a reader feel that way.
So I think that there are all sorts of ways that women writing from life the writing gets treated as somehow less shaped by craft, intentionality, artistry, when often I find that my artistry is most challenged when I'm that I have to bring everything I have as an artist to that work that is about the closest and most personal experiences that I've had.
One of the other threads that I so love in this book is about teaching, and teaches and about your identity as a teacher, And that seems to me to be almost as fundamental to it as the story of a disillusion of a relationship, the story even of parenthood. Is what it is to be a teacher and what it is to devote your life to that. How important is that to you?
Thank you for bringing that up, because because teaching and friendship.
Are two threads of this book that.
Are just tremendously important to me, and that feel connected to all the other threads as well, I think, I you know, one of the questions of this book is, like when when your nuclear family breaks apart, When when a marriage ends, when you're no longer raising your child inside the family structure that you'd expected to raise them inside of, Like what other forms of family and community and intimacy become not only possible but essential, Like when
you kind of don't have this one kind of stable structure the core of your life, Like where do you go looking for a sense of self and a sense of relation? And so for me, teaching in friendship became
these extremely important forces in my life. They'd always been important to me, but after my marriage ended, they became like ferociously important to me, and I think part of it with teaching had to do with this deep hunger to be a caregiver in all these different ways at once, like I was always being a caregiver to my daughter. But I think that I kind of on the other side of marriage. I found myself both with a kind of a sense of exhilarating freedom that I hadn't necessarily expected.
And at one point in the book, I describe it as it felt like I was in this a tub full of bubble bath. It was just overflowing, like I had all this like love and care that I just wanted to give somewhere, and you know, hopefully not in a totally.
Creepy or unboundaried way.
I was giving a lot of it to my students, and I loved putting my daughter to bed and showing up for their work. I felt very energized by this work of kind of getting this intimate contact with my students' creative impulses, with their lives, with the art they were trying to make, and that kind of collaborative process of helping them understand, hopefully a little bit better what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say. It was just it was a tremendous source of purpose and
really community for me. I mean it still is, but there was a way that my nerve endings were so raw and my needs were so intense in that time after my early separation that it felt like it turned up the volume on every feeling in my life.
I wonder whether it also reinforced a thing that you needed to have reinforced of a time, which was the idea that caregiving and relationships in the emotional space was also an intensely intellectual and creative process, that these weren't two fractured parts of who you were, they could be integrated in a real way. Yeah.
Absolutely, I think that's a very resonant insight. That part of why I was hungry to be kind of thinking about and making sense of my relationship with my daughter in those early years, even as I was living it was because I didn't want to understand that emotional work and the kind of intellect work of thinking about feeling and thinking about how a self is sort of made and unmade and remade by its relationships, Like I wanted
to think about caregiving and thinking together. And I think absolutely my relationships with students also bring together a sort of caregiving impulse and like a deeply intellectual enterprise. And one of the deep subjects of this book to me is understanding wisdom or the generation of wisdom as a collaborative enterprise. So, you know, for me, it is a collaborative enterprise. Like I don't come up with insights on my own I come up with insights in conversations, by reading,
by listening, by you know, any anything. My mind thinks, it's always thinking in relation to other minds, So I'm always dramatizing in this book like moments, you know, conversations with friends where I'm sort of having some delusion about my own life punctured or being challenged in some way, or being invited to think about my own life in a different way. You know, some of the best lines in this book belonged to my friend Harriet, my mother,
my therapist. But I wanted not just to incorporate those insights into the fabric and texture of the book, but I really wanted to dramatize explicitly that I was arriving at those insights by way of these conversations and collaborations. And I think teaching for me is like another form of collaborative meaning making.
As becoming a mother changed your certainties or firmed them up.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny.
It's a great question because I think I've never really understood myself to be a creature of certainties. I think I identify much more as a creature of doubt, like a creature made of questions, right, like made of interrogations and wonderings. But I do think that becoming a mother has made me aware that I am perhaps more composed of certainties that I want to believe myself to be. And part of that is just that, you know, there are lots
of things in my life that I question. My devotion to my daughter is not something I do.
I question my capacities as a parent.
Do I question the ways that I might be messing her up? Do I question the choice I made in a certain moment to you know, bribe her with a gummy candy? Of course, like I am full of insecurities and wonderings, but there's a devotion there that I don't question. So in a way, that feels more like certainty than any love that I've known or given myself to in
the past. And I also think It's helped me understand that my relationship to art making being a writer, there is a kind of certainty there that I hadn't always thought.
Of in those terms.
I think because my relationship to making art doesn't feel texture by certainty. It doesn't feel like, oh, I always know exactly what I need to do or exactly how I want to say this thing. Certainty is more like I know that this is what I want to be doing, Like I have always wanted to be a writer, and I've never really doubted that. That's like where the little
needle of my compass is pointed. And to kind of come to an understanding that there's a certainty in that desire that isn't implying hubris or arrogance or a sense that I always know what I'm doing, but more that I know that I want to be doing it or I want to be trying.
There's almost no better expression of uncertainty or our inner confusion than our Google search history. And I just wanted to touch upon that device within this book. And they kind of I've heard your pot of them as prose poems that kind of break up the sections of the book. Where did that idea come from and when when did that become part of the mix?
Thank you for asking about them. Yeah, I call them the Google lyrics. At the start of each section that splinters is composed of three parts. They're called Milk, Smoke, and Fever. You know, Milk is really about the first year of my daughter's life before my marriage ended. Smoke is about the year that followed my separation, and Fever is about.
The early stages of.
COVID quarantine and lockdown, where my daughter and I became kind of once again. This like tiny little diad unit. But each of those three sections opens with this prose poem entirely composed.
Of of Google searches.
So they range from you know, what is the name of the crib that does everything a mother is supposed to do? To why does the queen aunt want to start a new colony? I was interested in the ways that our Google search histories are these like strange telling ledger of our deepest wonderings and often our most private wonderings, Like we bring ourselves to ask Google things before we can ask them of any any one else.
I think, and so I started to think, Oh, what would you know, what would it look like.
To evoke a self by way of its Google searches, Like what kind of series of windows would that offer? So that's where I really came to the form. And then I just got really energized by the possibilities of juxtaposing, you know, the Queen Aunt starting the new colony Google Search with the hourly rates for divorce layers in New York City Google Search, because again, like that's kind of what a day holds is often just navigating these very
wildly different levels of life at once. And I, you know, at one point talk about the kind of panic of handing my computer over to somebody else, and like what, you know, what is the confessional booth of my auto complete going to reveal to them about my inner life and my obsession with the Mormon Tabernacle choir. You know, just like all the parts of the self that feel good of unspeakable we've spoken to Google.
I felt that that was the only part of the book where maybe you'd sanitize the truth about yourself that there were carefully removed to Google searchers for the history where you like, no one needs to know that I needed to do.
Yes, Yes, it's it's true.
There's a there's a director's cut out there with the rest of the minute.
Scandalous, I expect. Leslie Jamison, thank you.
So much, Thanks so much for having me what.
It's delight.
Leslie Jameson's latest book, Splinters, Another Kind of Love Story, is available now.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Read This. We'll be back tomorrow with another episode, and you can hear all of Read This by searching for it wherever you listen to podcasts.